When our family moved into the old house on Carlisle Street, everyone claimed a room, but I claimed a desk. It stood abandoned in the attic, oak-heavy and scarred, with a stubborn bottom drawer that no one could open. Dad said to leave it; the previous owner, a Mrs Alvarez, had been a cartographer , a maker of maps , and the desk had been hers for sixty years.

It took me a week of patient wiggling with a butter knife before the drawer surrendered. Inside lay a single hand-drawn map of our own suburb, but wrong in fascinating ways. The creek ran along streets that no longer existed. A cinema stood where the supermarket is now. In the corner, in neat pencil, she had written: 'Carlisle Street, as I first knew it, 1962.'

Except it wasn't only 1962. Faint, newer lines had been added over the decades , the cinema crossed out, the new school inked in , as if she had kept correcting her memory of the place until her eyes gave out. The last addition was our own house, redrawn with a small extension Dad built only last spring. She had still been mapping, from her window at the nursing home across the road.

I took the map to visit her on Saturday. Her hands shook too much to draw now, she said. So every month, I bring her the changes, and she tells me where the lines should go.