When I’m homesick, I take a walk down the streets on my screen | Leandra Beabout

This is the story of how I fell in love with Google Street View, which is really a story about coming home

I was eight years old when I learned what nostalgia feels like. Standing at the top of a hill near my family’s rented farmhouse in Ohio, I surveyed spiderwebs glittering in the morning dew while pining for firefly-lit evenings outside my old church in Tennessee.

When I was 10, we moved to Slovakia. While my parents boxed up the house on Spruce Street, I ran out back to rake my fingers into the sandy earth, filling an old film canister with Pennsylvania dirt I’d label in blue ink: “U.S.A.” Later, when we moved back to the US just before my 16th birthday, I added a handful of now-defunct coins to my collection of photos, letters and United States topsoil.

Related: With the help of very cold water I reinvented myself | Emma Withers

I’m 32 now, with more than a decade of Street View excursions in the rear-view mirror. It’s still magic

Related: Google Street View’s ability to calculate car accident risks is digital tech writ large | John Naughton

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3asREKB