My Enviromental Autobiography
By Maeve Merrick
The Dogwood tree in full bloom in my childhood front yard. The tree was planted to celebrate my older brother’s birth.
This past fall semester, I took a seminar course titled “Environmental Psychology: An Exploration of Space and Place” which focused on the relationship between a person and their environment. I learned about a myriad of topics including place attachment, root shock, urban/rural/suburban relationships, gentrification, globalization, and urban planning. The class mainly consisted of discussing textbook readings and personal experiences, exploring how we are shaped by our upbringing and past living spaces. One of the writing assignments zeroed in on this idea, prompting us to write an “Environmental Autobiography” detailing the places, spaces, and environments of your childhood and how they made you the person you are today while also citing academic readings from the class. This essay was my favorite assignment of the semester and I recently realized just how well it fits with the theme of our upcoming zine about second chances, wasted spaces, and the idea of a person as a mosaic. So, I have decided to share my environmental autobiography, to inspire you to make your own, whether it be through an essay, pictures, paintings, or any other art your heart desires.
It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that growing up in my childhood home in Charlotte, North Carolina was absolutely essential to me becoming the person I am today. A one-story bungalow built right before World War II, my childhood home is the only place I had ever lived before moving to New York for college. From an objective standpoint, the house is far from perfect. My room was originally a large walk-in closet connected to my brother Leo’s official bedroom and is built on an intense slant. My desk was placed on this slant and I still have to turn whatever piece of paper I am writing on at an angle to make it feel natural. There is a cluttered front porch, an unkempt backyard, and a cramped interior, especially for how much space my family occupies. While there are only four of us, we are big people, literally and figuratively. Each of us stand at almost six feet or taller, with creative minds, a love for maximalism, and extroverted personalities. There was not an inch of space in my childhood home that was not taken up by something or someone. And I adored it.
A Polaroid of me (left) and a picture of my grandmother (right) on display in the hallway of my house in North Carolina.
In her nonfiction book “House As a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home,” author Clare Cooper Marcus describes how children only feel connected to a hiding place if it is a space they can modify and have complete control over, describing the idea of territorial imperative. As a young child, apart from my room, I did not have a hiding place that I felt was mine to modify, and I did not need one, as my parents were so open to allowing Leo and I to change the house to our liking. My dad once brought up the idea of starting a garden in our front yard, which was quickly shut down as he would destroy Leo and my wiffle ball field. All of our drawings were put up in the living room, our Legos lined the dining room shelves, and our science experiments crowded the kitchen counter allowing the house to feel even fuller.
This chaotic energy went beyond just the interior design of my house, as my parents would regularly have too many friends over during too late hours of school nights, people spilling into the side yard, and music and conversation noise spilling into my room at the back of the house while I was trying to sleep. This was a regular occurrence, as was loud noise in general during the nights at my house. The cargo train runs through my neighborhood, less than half a mile away from my bed, so every night, I would hear the sounds of the horn, just far enough away to be soothing. Even now, I crave that noise while trying to sleep, listening to Harry Potter audiobooks in my dorm bed, and loving the idea of having a ground-level apartment in NYC where I can allow the loud noise of the city to lull me to sleep. Beyond the noises at night, music filled my house at all hours of the day. It would get to a point where my dad would be cooking in the kitchen playing Billy Joel off of the kitchen speaker, my mom cleaning the living room listening to Parliament on the TV, Leo doing homework in his room playing a Led Zeppelin vinyl, and me, too young to have any way to play my music, wandering through this tiny house and listening to this strange radio. This experience also plays a massive role in my day-to-day behavior now, as I listen to hours of music every single day. Safe to say, my house in Charlotte has been and always will be an extraordinary place.
My family’s backyard after a party.
Beyond my house, some of the most significant places in my life exist within a mile radius of my childhood home. In addition to hiding places, Marcus also writes about the importance of outdoor childhood experiences and how those have the biggest impact in many cases, something that I can relate to. Despite being a ten-minute drive to a central downtown area, Leo and I regularly walked around the neighborhood barefoot, eating berries off the mulberry trees, exploring the overgrown milk-bottle alleyways, and having an overall outdoor childhood. Perhaps the most significant outdoor space of my childhood was the woods behind my house, which separates the residential neighborhood from a large swath of factories. Anthropologist Setha Low writes about spatializing culture and how analyzing culture from a space perspective can provide valuable insight and help keep community places intact. The woods behind my house are an excellent example of this, as they would have been torn down years ago if it was not for the owner of the land being a father and understanding the importance of having a neighborhood for your children to comfortably grow up in. So, he kept the woods to keep the neighborhood pleasant, a rare case of a businessman prioritizing people over profit.
This choice to keep the woods alive impacted Leo and me in so many ways. As they were located right behind our backyard and Leo is six years older than me, my parents allowed us to explore the woods just the two of us when I was as young as six. Just imagine how magical those few miles of trees seemed to a fairy-obsessed six-year-old, building tiny rock houses in the nooks of trees and finding little spaces underneath the vegetation to read Magic Tree House books. We would play in that forest for hours, with our yellow lab Katie roaming free beside us, talking about anything and everything, feeling much more grown up than we were. Now, as an environmental studies major, I know that those trips into those trees sparked my care for nature more than any day trip to a national park ever could. The woods were not grand or breathtaking, but the mundaneness of them is what made them so impactful on me, as I could feel like I truly understood the woods, like they were mine. Yet, despite how wonderful and cherished these trips into the trees were, one day, suddenly they stopped.
My family’s backyard and the woods behind them.
As one could probably tell by how much he is mentioned, my brother Leo profoundly impacted my childhood, particularly the spaces I occupied as a child. When he moved to Chicago to go to college, I was only twelve years old and suddenly a lone, awkward middle schooler. Without Leo, my parents banned me from going into the forest alone as the unhoused population in my city was rising, and many of them had begun living in the woods in tents. Geographer David Harvey defines the different dimensions of space, describing how space can go beyond the physical area that one takes up. While perhaps not as complicated as Harvey’s description, Leo leaving for college and removing the woods as a space helped me come to the understanding that space is so much more than just an area in the world. So, as I grew up and began my adolescence, I was forced to shed the places of my childhood and find the courage to explore more places by myself.
As I grew, I found new spaces just as close to my heart as my childhood home and neighborhood. In middle school, my best friends Kiki and Philip moved to a beautiful house right across from a park. This house quickly became the center of my social activity throughout middle and high school, with the basement, in particular, becoming my friend group’s home base. With a ping pong table, walls covered in our drawings, and a giant pull-out couch, there was not a more perfect place for a teenage girl to spend her days and nights. I was lucky enough in high school to have a big, loving group of boys and girls who I adored more than anything and wanted to spend every waking moment with. Spending all of high school in Kiki and Philip’s small basement with this massive group of loud, funny teenagers reminded me of the noisy gathering my parents would have at my house, both of which were places of nurturance, as Marus describes, and both of which gave me a limitless social battery. While I enjoy being alone and have many hobbies, I will never say no to a friend asking to hang out with me, and I love talking to strangers and meeting new people. Kiki and Philip’s basement was a magical place, and I will always be grateful to them and their family for always hosting and providing a place for our friend group to be us. Yet, despite how truly special their basement is to me, there was a short period of time when it was unavailable, and that time perhaps even means more.
My friends celebrating a birthday in Kiki and Philip’s basement.
The summer before my junior year of high school, Kiki was at camp the entire break so hanging out in her basement was no longer an option. My friends and I were left to search for another shared space. One summer day, while wandering through my neighborhood, tired of being cooped up in my tiny room, we ended up at Common Market, an independent convenience store with a deli and a bar, the closest you could get to a bodega in North Carolina. Perhaps most important to me and my friends, Common Market has outdoor seating with a patio cover and the staff cares very little about whether or not you buy something from the store. The crowd was alternative; they were older than us but young, and the music was cool and loud. It was perfect, a haven for three different teenage girls who struggled to fit into a southern city. We settled in, sitting on the front patio every day, nursing a singular Arizona Tea or Yerba Mate over several hours while chatting and playing Gin Rummy. Even beyond the wonderful social aspect, we felt safe there as young girls, as the staff always asked if we were okay when an older guy tried to talk to us. Common Market is truly a special place, and it made that summer unforgettable for my friends and I.
Even beyond the memories of that summer, Common Market has always been close to my heart. As a child, I would go there at least once a week for my after-school snack before ballet class and my family would regularly order sandwiches from the deli for a picnic in the local park. This history made it even more wonderful to rediscover this place as a teenager with my friends. Common Market showed me that the same space can shape you differently during different times of your life. It showed me that it is okay to stop exploring the woods, for my childhood home not to be filled with music as it once was, and for me to move hundreds of miles away from where I grew up. I learned that you can change, and the space can change with you.
My friends playing cards at Common Market that one summer.
