KIIIIIRRRRRRSSSSTTTTEEENNNNN! (if you are the Kirsten I think you are) Long time no hear from! I'd been wondering - I'm sure you've been busy.

Yes, The Attic was a little store in downtown Hudson (when we were in high school). It was originally in a different location - when I was "little" - and was really into buying penny candy - it was a tiny shop BEHIND another shop (a Realtor's, maybe?) I just remember that it was small and sort of oddly shaped and it was off the main line of the downtown - but they did move, I don't remember exactly when, it may have been about 1980 or so.

I also remember "The Land of Make-Believe" (I think that was what it was called?) and the Reserve Exchange and Saywell's Drugs, which will forever be in my memory as The Shop Where Brian From My Class Fainted on a Hot Day after the Class Walked Down There for Ice Cream (that would have been like 6th grade or so for me).

Oh, oh, and the Learned Owl bookshop.

I used Google Earth one day to find the house where I grew up. It's still standing (though I already knew that - one of my mom's friends back there called her up one day asking if she and my dad didn't want to move back to Hudson because she "knew a nice house that came on the market"). But still, there's something oddly comforting about looking at the Google Earth aerial view and seeing it still there. It looks like the spruce tree next to it is still there, though most of that (terrible) Russian Olive hedge is now gone.

(And I am sure the occupants of the house would love the thought that I'm remotely spying on the place where I grew up.)

Hudson seems to have changed a lot - lots more housing developments, and (from what I've heard of the people I know who still live there) incredible, terrible road congestion.

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Always a nice little surprise to hear from someone from my past, before I sit down to grade lab reports. (Lab, mercifully, got done over an hour early today...it was hot in that room. Guess the a/c is on the fritz yet again.)