“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The house the Butts family had occupied at that time is situated just around the corner, a block away — almost visible from the front porch of the Markle place. (Later I found several old photographs of it in one of our family albums, and was reminded that in those days the streets had no curbs.) Even today I can recall most of the families, and their children, who’d lived in the immediate area. Those few blocks largely made up my childhood world.

Now when Jane and I drive over those modest streets, I feel a sense of familiarity and strangeness that’s hard to describe. Curbs or no, the neighborhood has changed remarkably little considering the number of years involved. I tell myself that all of the trees are much taller and thicker now, and I experience an odd wonder that the wooden houses are still standing. I also tell myself that many others must have similar feelings about environments that were once important to them — and that, indeed, still are. But since becoming acquainted with Seth’s ideas of time, I’m more than ever conscious that when we journey there’s much more involved than a trip through space.

The place in question is located within a few blocks of the neighborhood to which my family moved in 1931, as described in Note 1. Since it sits on one of the main streets of Sayre, at a busy corner, I know that I must have passed by it many times in subsequent years; yet I’d never noticed the house as an individual entity until Jane and I walked up to its front door with the Johnsons. When the Johnsons told us who the owners were, I could only reply that I’d heard the name while living in Sayre; the old couple would be contemporary with my mother. Although I couldn’t remember my mother mentioning them, it was at least possible that she’d known them. There could have been links through mutual friends. To some small extent, then, Jane and I could toy with inferences drawn from Seth’s comment that that particular house had represented my mother’s second choice. I could hardly ask her, since she’d died five months ago, but Stella Butts could have known the owners, and been in their home; she could have liked it inordinately …