About

I was deleting old and new photos from my phone when I paused on one my sister had sent me—an image of our ancestral home, the house we grew up in. I was surprised by the warmth that rose in my chest. It wasn’t a rush of memories, exactly, but it did spark one.

We had a large cherry tree in the backyard. The low branches were easy to reach, but I remember climbing higher, where the cherries tasted even sweeter. Halfway up the tree, I ate too many.

I can still picture myself sitting on the back porch afterward, full of cherries, thinking how lucky I was to have that life. All of that—and more—came back to me as I looked at that photograph from 1963.

A few days later, I read an article about the science of place memory. In neuroscience, it’s called spatial memory encoding. Your brain doesn’t store “I got married in Denver.” It stores the corner of 16th and Wazee. The brick building on the left. The plaza on the right. The mountains in the distance.

That’s when it clicked.

If places can hold memory—and memory can carry warmth, meaning, and connection—then it’s possible to bring those feelings to others. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people.

So, together with my son, I started Plinth & Place: to give people the opportunity to reconnect with the places that shaped them—and the feelings those places still hold.