Life & Place · A Decembers list
Every roof that ever sheltered you
You can still walk your childhood house in the dark — the third stair that creaked, the smell of the basement, the window that stuck. Ask which house came after and the count starts, and you're surprised how long it runs.
This is the list for all of them, in order. One address to a line, and as much as you care to say about the room, the street, the people next door.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Say one address out loud and the whole place rebuilds itself — the layout of the rooms, where the sun came in, the name of the family across the fence you hadn't thought of in years.
A deed records a purchase date and a price. It says nothing about which bedroom was yours, why the kitchen faucet dripped, or the woman two doors down who watched the kids when your car wouldn't start. The places that shaped you leave almost no paper trail — a change-of-address card, a utility bill long since thrown out. What actually happened inside those walls lives only in whoever was there.
Nobody sits down to write the history of every place they lived; it feels like too much, and the early ones blur. But one address is easy. You can put down the house on Elm Street in a minute — the porch, the neighbors, the room you shared with your brother. Then the next one comes, because each place hands you the one that followed. A line at a time, the whole map of a life fills in without ever feeling like a chore.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
What each address brings back
Who else was under that roof
A house is really the people in it. The grandmother in the back room, the boarder who paid rent in the lean years, the brother across the hall, the first spouse, the first baby brought home from the hospital. Naming the address names everyone who shared it with you.
The street and the neighbors
The family whose kids you grew up with, the man who ran the corner store, the widow who kept the tidiest yard on the block. Some neighborhoods you knew every porch; others you barely met the people next door. Both are worth setting down while the names still come.
The room that was yours
Where the bed sat, what was on the walls, which window you looked out of. The attic room that baked in July, the shared bedroom with a line drawn down the middle, the first apartment where the radiator clanked all night. These are the details that make a place yours and no one else's.
By the kind of place
- Childhood home
- The house you were born into or grew up in — often the one you remember in the most detail, down to the pattern of the linoleum.
- First place alone
- The rented room or walk-up apartment that was the first address with only your name on the mailbox.
- Married years
- The starter house or apartment where a marriage began, before the family got big enough to need more room.
- Raising a family
- The house with the yard and the bedrooms, where the kids grew up and the driveway filled with bikes.
- After the kids
- The smaller place you moved to when the house got quiet — a condo, a cottage, closer to town or closer to family.
- Where you are now
- The current address, the one you know by heart because you're living it right now.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of every place that held your life, in the order you lived them
Together these addresses trace the whole path — every street, every doorway, every room. Start with the one you can still walk in the dark, and let the next one follow.