My mom sent me a link to this audio slideshow last week, and recommended I watch it. I just did, and it made me sad, and homesick and grateful for my neighborhood in Winooski.

It’s a slideshow of Detroit, near where my father grew up. My dad and his family lived one block away from the family of the guy who narrates this slideshow. You can actually see my dad’s old house in one of the pictures of Fletcher Field. He and the Resmer family lived across the street from the park.

I grew up a few miles from this neighborhood, but on the other side of 8 Mile Road, in suburbia — East Detroit, now Eastpointe. I haven’t been back to visit my dad’s old house since my grandmother moved out in the 1980s.

Most of the houses around there are vacant now. They’ve been stripped, boarded up. Glad I got this audio postcard, to remind me of what I left behind.

Seven Days’ deputy publisher and co-owner Cathy Resmer is a writer, editor and advocate for local journalism. She works in the paper’s Burlington office and lives vicariously through the reporters while raising money to pay them. Cathy started at...