This is what the house I grew up in looks like now.

That house is tiny. Like, it’s essentially the size of a decent-sized two-bedroom apartment. The four of us could live there only because they made my sister’s bedroom out of the garage — my dad and my grandfather did it themselves before I was born. It’s only one full-sized room or two small-sized rooms “deep,” really; it’s basically a long tunnel split into rooms along the way. Legend has it that it was built originally for a woman who was claustrophobic and was gradually divided up by later owners; I have no idea if that’s apocryphal. But it’s really small. It has a one-butt-at-a-time galley kitchen, from which my mother raised two kids, which is a hilarious notion today, of course. How small? If I’m understanding the geography correctly based on what’s left of the house, the window next to the telephone pole is in the kitchen; the next window down is the family room; the next window is my bedroom. What was my parents’ room is at the back of the house across from my bedroom; the living room is behind the little kitchen, and my sister’s room, as I said, is where the garage would be, on the driveway end. But it’s very disorienting, because…it’s all different.

When I lived there, it looked absolutely nothing like this. You would never recognize it in a picture. Until my parents moved when I was in college, it was a flat-roofed red-brick house, covered with ivy. The yard was full of trees, so we never had a green lawn like this, ever. There was an enormous tulip poplar at what would be the front left corner of the house in this picture. You couldn’t even get your arms around it. It was, I think, where that huge driveway is now. The driveway wasn’t there, then, wrapping around the house like that. That was all trees. The ones the clothesline stretched between, among others. We had a swing that hung from the tulip tree, and a friend of my father’s almost broke his neck seeing how high he could jump from the swing during a picnic in our front yard. There was a row of spiraea bushes along the road — it’s a fairly busy road (with a tendency to eat cats, frankly), and the bushes gave it greatly enhanced peace and privacy.

It was always the coolest place in the neighborhood (temperature-wise), because of all the cover. It was almost entirely shaded, which is probably part of why we didn’t have central air conditioning until the last few years my parents lived there. Just one enormous window fan in my parents’ room, and honestly, I can’t say it ever seemed like a huge issue.

I was completely unaware of the house being tiny at the time; I didn’t care a bit. It was the only house I’d ever lived in, so my room was just My Room, not one of many examples of what a possible My Room could look like. My sister and I were space-conscious — when we were very little, one of our games was to pile up everything we owned on one of our beds like we were packing for a trip. In honor of my grandparents’ home city, the place we most often traveled (always by car), we called this game “Cincinnati.”

The full yard of trees was a blessing and a curse, obviously. The shade was wonderful; the raking of leaves was not, so much. We always had such a carpet of leaves in the fall that my sister and I and our friends had an outdoor game in which we created a city made up of little piles of leaves representing different houses and buildings, and the paths from one place to another would be ones we raked ourselves. Every city needed a superhero; ours was Super Sally. My sister played Super Sally, of course.

When I was in college and it came time for my parents to move, they sold the house to a young guy who was a landscaper; I have no idea whether he owns it now. The first thing he did was put a fake stone facade over the red brick. He added the sloped roof, probably to give it a little attic space, which is understandable, but looked a little silly to me when I finally saw it. And that foyer thing sticking off the front? Like it’s the Fancypants Estate In Delaware-Upon-Avon? Most shocking to me, though, was the decision to rip out the entire yard full of trees. The bushes, too. Now it has a flat, green-brown lawn, like every other house everywhere, instead of the ivy and the brick and the tulip poplar.

I had always figured that the only thing that gave the house any value was the yard. Inside, it was…really, seriously, unrealistically small for a family of four, by any standards you’d see in practice now. Eat-in kitchen, no dining room. No garage anymore (obviously). Two tiny bedrooms and one that was normal-sized. (The “master suite,” if by “master suite,” you mean “room big enough for a king-sized bed with maybe three feet of space around it.”) A sump pump that flooded when it rained a lot, and a dank basement you had to bail when that happened.

Don’t get me wrong — I loved that house, and I was never, ever aware of these things about it as a kid. I remember when I was probably eight or nine, I had one of my last birthday parties where all the girls in my class were invited (you know the ones). A girl who was most definitely not my friend but had been in school with me since kindergarten came to the party, and the next week at school, she said to me, “I can’t believe all of you live in that TINY HOUSE.” And what was so amazing about it was that I realized I had never thought about it. I didn’t care; it was our house and our yard and there was a big woods out back with a mucky pond, and I loved it. She lived in a very, very big house, of course.

Anyway, when it was sold, I’d figured somebody would buy it for the amazing yard. For the trees, and the shade, and the spiraea that sprinkled white “snow” when you shook them. For the three big juniper bushes along the front of the house, and the birch tree with the crocuses around it in little clumps. And this guy bought it, and then he took the trees out and built that huge-ass eyesore of a driveway. Why would you buy this particular house, I wondered, if you didn’t want the trees?

It’s not that he wasn’t within his rights. He bought the house; some people don’t like trees. I don’t have to live there anymore. My parents love where they live now, and I love visiting them. It’s just always been totally mysterious to me, and when I learned that the house could be spotted on Google Maps with Street View, I had to have one more peek. Every time I look at it, I think, “That’s fine, I guess, but why did you buy this house? What could have possibly drawn you to this house if you thought the brick was old and the ivy was straggly and the trees were a nuisance and you really, really wanted a better view of the cars flying by? Why didn’t you buy any of the four zillion other houses that look exactly like this?”

Because frankly, I liked it the way it was.