Human memory is not great. Human memory is well documented as often being garbage for accuracy. If I were a reliable news source, there would be several citations for that, but mostly this is blog is about stick figures and postcards. Sometimes both. Maybe a little photography in there too. Visual narrative, as it were. Potential memory anchors.
I have just started reading Telling Your Story by Jerry Apps, a book about preserving "your history through storytelling." Apps recommends the exercise of drawing the floor plan of where they lived when they were ten to twelve, and then add any details they remember. Room assignments, furniture, smells, sounds, stories. I decided to give it a try, but opening with the first house I remember, where I lived until I was six(ish).
Because of how variable images can be displayed on the numerous devices of the the world, I included an image of the whole page, followed by slices.
Imagine watching ten three-second movie clips, and then trying to draw a map based on the information at hand. That is what this process was like for me. The accuracy or inaccuracy is the result of tiny flashes of memory, combining my actual experience with stories I have been told and visuals gleaned from similar spaces. This is memory archaeology.
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