Okay, not really. Alexandria is situated right in the middle of the state and is situated in a perfect location to be the center of trade, communication, and infrastructre of the state. But it isn't. Because they have had idiots running the show for decades. When I was a kid, the mayor tried to find a use for the city's swimming pools while they were closed during the off season, so he stocked them with catfish. Only someone didn't tell him that fish don't take to chlorinated water all that well. I digress.
Here's the old house (HINT: click on the street address in the map below. For some reason the arrow on this map is not pointing to the right area. The map that opens up will be correct.)

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It's the one with the brown roof in the center. The yard's boundaries are roughly defined by the roads on the northeast and east sides, to the southwest by a line that starts near the large solitary tree to the south and runs parallel to the NE road, and a line that would continue to the SW where the two roads to the NNE intersect. It was about an acre to give you an sense of scale.

The large tree to the south and the two trees between the house and the road that runs NW/SE are large pecan trees. The two side by side are about 50 feet tall and the one to the south is a real monster, 80-100 feet. All the rest of the trees around the house are trees my dad planted and were only 5-6 foot saplings when we moved out.

My brother and I used to play in the fields to the south and south east. They were always planted with cotton, or corn, or sugarcane. When they were planted with cotton, we'd grab our plastic rifles and hide in the cotton rows, pretending the cotton combines picking cotton were enemy tanks or giant imperial walkers. My dad would go out sometimes and cut off a piece of sugarcane and let us chew it. When the fields were fallow, the grass would grow up over your shoulders. We'd go out and mash the grass down and make rooms and hallways and pretend it was a fort.

The building with a red roof directly to the east is a barn. I used to stand on top of our picnic table, which was under the big pecan tree, and shoot the roof of the barn with a bb gun. It was cool to take a shot and count "one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thouasnd-three" before you heard the "WHOCK" the bb made against the barn's tin roof. In the winter, the trees thinned enough that I could see the bayou (which curves in in the bottom right corner and curves out in the upper right) and could sploosh shots into it.

The road that runs off the main road to the NE is where I learned to drive. The houses in the area didn't have trash collection, we used to have to take our trash to a dumpster, about a quarter-mile up this road (which was dirt at the time.) When I was 12 or 13, my dad started letting me put the garbage bags in the trunk of his car and drive it down to the dumpster.

If you follow the main road southeast to where it both the road and the bayou make a bend and run directly east...right there between the road in the bayou, back up in the trees is where I smoked my first cigarette. Thankfully, it was also my last cigarette.

Zoom the map out about 2 or 3 clicks. If you follow the bayou north to where it makes a bend to the west, and draw a line directly north from the house until it crosses the bayou, you can see a little grass airstrip. There used to be some crop dusters stationed here. We'd hear them flying around outside and we'd go out and wave and they'd waggle their wings back.

When I was in 6th grade, I got punished for talking in class. For that, I had to "write pages" (which basically consisted of hand-copying some book until I filled up 12 pages of paper, single-spaced, no margins, front-and-back.) I didn't do my pages so I got suspended from school for a day. When I got home from school, I left my suspension notice on the kitchen counter for my parents to find, grabbed my tent and sleeping bag and ran away from home. If you follow the dirt road to the east of the house directly south until it comes to a creek, you'll see a building with a reddish roof on the south side of the creek. Follow that creek east until it runs into some trees. That's where I ran away to. My dad found me about three hours later.

Wasn't a bad little place to live.