Try to see Edmonton like a tourist/child . . .
When I look look at Edmonton from a child's perspective, I find that it entails interacting with an area on a much more intimate level. This intimacy, however, is a physical connection that is free from the encodings that things acquire as one grows up. For example, a stop sign from the perspective of a child--or at least for me when I think back--isn't firmly encoded with the idea of 'STOP'. For the child, the sign is something that can be climbed and swung around, or maybe a meeting place. Everything changes; grass is dug up and thrown; pine trees are potential lookout points; the neighbors lawn is enemy territory. And overall, I think, everything is just so condensed. The pattern of the bark on front-yard tree is known by heart. The rivulets of water that trickle down the driveway have been intimately mapped, and often barricaded with collections of dirt and mud.
Then things change. You move to a new town, switch houses: place has become transitory, no longer the stable center. Physical contact gives way to a new connection: an immediate concoction of past events and future plans that mix with the lived moment. I think that as a child one is free from this mixture of past, present, and future--there is just the now.
I like how you say childhood experiences are really condensed -- it's true. My world was as little as me, contained within these tiny boundaries. I used to think of my neighbourhood as almost being a continent, and all of the places as individual countries (I was a nerdy, Social Studies-loving kid, okay.) Mine was the smallest of all, and I rarely got to leave it without a guide/parent. And it's true, too, that you make so much out of what little you have. My little country felt so big with all the things I could do in it.
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