I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

Map making, cartography, isn't just practical, it's emotional.

Maps show us places that mean something to us.

Places we've lived, places we've visited, places we long to see someday.

I was talking with a friend recently

about the two neighborhoods I lived in as a child.

The first was called Forest Park East in Columbus, Ohio.

In Forest Park, the roads were all named after trees. I lived on

lilacwood Avenue. My mother was raised in the same neighborhood. Her parents lived on Redwood.

The next neighborhood my family moved to was called Freedom Colony.

It was built in 1976, the U.S. bicentennial.

So the streets are all named after places and battles from the American Revolution.

Yes, it's 1776 in Freedom Colony.

My house was on Liberty Lane, and I would ride my bike to visit friends who lived on other side streets and cul-de-sacs,

Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and Old North Church.

It's pretty kitschy, I know, but it makes me smile.

Home is a mythic place, as much as a real place.

It's different in our minds than it is on the map.

And some of what we remember isn't on the map at all, the way we felt when we were there,

how we spent our time in that place, and who we were with. The emotional cartography of any

place is different from its actual cartography. Today's poem takes us to erode far from the

speaker's home. The poet is a veteran who once served as an Army-82nd Airborne Division paratrooper in Iraq.

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