Most people tend to use Google maps to get from here to there, but sometimes, it can also be used to travel through time. That is the way that Sherri Turner used it, and she shared her experience on Twitter.
In order to take her trip back through time, she used the photo archives found in Google maps and it was quite an experience. She started by using Google maps Street view to look at her mother’s old house where she grew up. The image had been taken in 2009.
Turner then went on to tweet through poetry talking about her experience and how this little piece of her mother’s life had been preserved digitally. When the picture was taken, there was a light on in her bedroom. She was still alive at the time and it was her house. She was also still visiting her mother at the time several times per month.
Turner lost her mother about four years ago, but when she turned on Google maps, she was able to use the street view feature to revisit some better times in the past. When giving an interview with Recode, she mentioned that seeing the light on made it more like something she stumbled across rather than something that was made to happen.
She went on to describe her experience in this way: “Her little pink car will still be in the garage, but I will have taken a taxi from the station and when it arrives she will be standing in that doorway, smiling and waving, smaller than the last time I saw her. We will play Scrabble and watch Tipping Point and there will have been no pandemic, no other deaths, no as-yet-undiscovered illnesses. And I won’t know how perfect it is and I wouldn’t go back and say, even if I could, because sometimes it’s best not to know. I take a Screen Print of the house, with the light on, because it won’t last forever, and one day the Google van will go back down that street and replace her house with someone else’s and though there may be a light on in the window it won’t be her.”
It’s a moment I think we can all appreciate.