A map of childhood

Have you noticed how as a child, things beyond your daily trail seem completely other-worldly?

How when you stopped at an apple orchard in the mountains at age seven, biting into a piece of fruit so fresh it almost hurt your mouth with flavour you felt like you were in tourist commercial?

And remember when you went on a trip with Girl Guides to a namless country town three hours west of Sydney and you camped by a nameless lake, near a nameless road, under a nameless mountain and it stormed and stormed all night and dropped to temperatures that made your hands go numb and stop working when you needed to pack up the tents the next morning? You returned to that nameless town years later, to live and work. It's called Orange.

Or how you drove with your Dad to watch your brother play cricket on the other side of Sydney where people like you didn't live and you passed a grungy hotel on a stop-start road that streteched for miles, a pub you knew hosted gigs for bands you wanted to like but didn't yet. That was Annandale, where you now go to church.

Or how on your way to another game in another part of Sydney you saw that giant billboard advertising Coca-Cola hanging over the freeway like a little piece of New York and you wondered where you were? That was Kings Cross.

How those years felt like sewing tiny pieces of fabric together from the back seat of the car to make a map that would eventually take you somewhere and how inevitably, as the map joined up, how you would tap at the ceiling above you like some arctic animal coming up for air only to realise how little you really knew.

Or how nothing's really changed.