October 9, 2019:
One irony being: it was in reality not safe at all.
I lived in permanent fight-or-flight, one of the origins of chronic insomnia, where every rustle in the bush outside my window left me awake on high alert. I don't know if this originated in abduction by aliens or repressed memories of beatings by the violent father or some more mundane cause. Whatever the spark, the truth is in 20 years I was never relaxed there, except perhaps in daytime after sex with smuggled-in girlfriends.
Objectively, we'd been burglarized, twice, by neighborhood kids who once were friends. Another time a stranger tried to climb in an open window, probably by mistake, but it left a scar. So there were some objective triggers.
Mostly the nostalgia is entirely irrational, and you have to wonder WTF?