Personal Narrative: From Walkertown To Winston-Salem

All my life I have lived in the small town of Walkertown, which is only about twenty minutes away from Winston-Salem. Five years ago Walkertown was small and you had to go to the next town over, Kernersville, if you wanted to go shopping for clothes or go out for dinner. Now, Walkertown is a lot more developed and less rural. However, it is nowhere near as developed as Winston-Salem, especially downtown. Winston-Salem is a built up city with a lot of impervious surfaces. However, as industrial as downtown Winston-Salem might be, there are some ‘green spaces’ like parks and fields in some places. When looking at Google Earth I typed in my old address because that’s the area in Walkertown I would know the best. Avalee St. (my street) is how I remember it; a long street with a few houses and woods surrounding it. However, the woods were cut short on the West side due to the new neighborhood (Esher Dr.) being built. There are also a lot of new things that were built, like the new Walkertown Middle School. It’s so new that the first graduating class was in 2014. Other places like McDonald’s and Sheetz are not as new as the school, but I do remember when nothing was there except trees. So, my neighborhood might not have really changed, but most of Walkertown did. There is a new high school to the West and new restaurants to the

Obviously, the most built up part is downtown. It is packed full of impervious surfaces. There are restaurants, companies, banks, places to shop and a multitude of other things. However, the farther you get from downtown, it changes. To the East is Salem College as well as another school and many houses. That might sound like a lot but compared to downtown it is pretty open. There are even some little sections of woods. The West is also similar to the East. There are some buildings, a hospital and lots of houses but there are green spaces that you don’t really see in