Let’s play some word association:

If you’re like me, you immediately thought of a song:

Where The Streets Have No Name

Our House

Sunset Boulevard

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Maybe street conjures images of your childhood: learning to ride a bike, playing ball, mowing grass, raking leaves, shoveling snow.

Street brings to mind my first real job: working at our local animal shelter; it’s the job that helped me love running.

Down our 2/10 mile unpaved driveway.

Well, it was unpaved. Paved previously yet at that point cracked into near oblivion, it has since been repaved. But when I ran that stretch it was one huge undulating mass of broken asphalt and dirt.

Onto the paved road for 3/4 of a mile or so – avoiding the trucks and tractors and cars that seemed to veer closer to the edge of the road as they neared me. As bad as it was in summer, it was worse in the winter.

Turn onto the tar-and-chip road for another half-mile, passing the old Woolworth Mansion, run-down hay barns, and the old state bridge with its metal marker still visible in the abutment.

That was then.

Ten years later and six hundred miles away, I have a slightly – but not much – different view:

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