Zillow is great for stalking houses in which you used to live

I grew up here.

Including the house Terry and I currently own, I've only lived in three places my entire life.

And all three of those places are in the same city.

I grew up at good old 1807 Harding Drive, living there from birth through age 22. Then I moved into 1913 East 300th Street, our first house after we got married. We lived there for 11 years before moving up here to Miller Avenue in beautiful Wickliffe Heights.

For my local friends, it should be noted that while "Wickliffe Heights" is not a true political entity, it is the real name of the subdivision on and around Rockefeller Road in the southern part of the city. It even says "Wickliffe Heights" on our house deed.

Anyway, the point is, there was a time not long ago when, once you moved out of a house, your chances of ever seeing the inside of it again were pretty slim. You would have had to sell it to someone you know, or at least someone who was willing to let you back in if you would randomly swing by years later.

Nowadays, however, real estate listings are easily accessible online, and they often include copious photos of the inside of the house.

Take the Zillow.com listing for 1807 Harding, for instance. While it doesn't contain a "copious" number of photos, there are still five shots of the interior of the house that bring back a flood of memories.

There's the living room with the big front window looking out onto the porch. The one and only bathroom in a house that at one time contained six of us. The small but peaceful fenced-in backyard.

I love being able to look at these images whenever I want. My parents moved into that house 62 years ago this month, and it still holds considerable sentimental value.

The Zillow listing for 1913 East 300th offers much more in the way of photos, many of which reveal significant upgrades to the house since we moved out in 2003.

The enclosed front porch is familiar enough, but that deck in the backyard? Yeah, we didn't put that in.

Nor did we rip out the island in the kitchen or make the dining room look so fancy.

(In our defense, we spent most of our 300th Street years having and raising babies. We were a bit preoccupied.)

This shot of the kitchen?

You could have shown me that photo and asked if it looked familiar, and I would have said no. I spent more than a decade eating breakfasts and washing dishes in that room, but it's almost unrecognizable to me 20+ years later.

They say you can't go home again, and that's usually true. But you can at least see what home looks like now, which I think is pretty cool.

We always just assumed we were middle class

The Pew Research Center offers this online calculator that will tell you whether you're considered to be in the lower, middle, or upper income tier based on the part of the U.S. in which you live, your annual household income before taxes, and the number of people in your household. (If you click that link, it should open up in a separate window so you don't have to navigate away from this post.)

My personal results were just about where I figured they would be, but it made me think back to when I was growing up on Harding Drive in good old suburban Wickliffe, Ohio. We always thought of ourselves as middle class, as did everyone else on our street, as far as I knew.

I say "as far as I knew" because over time, I've come to learn there are people who secretly have lots of money but who, for whatever reason, choose to live very frugal lifestyles and only appear to be middle class.

The gauge I used as a kid for figuring out whether people were "rich" was not so much the size of their house, but how close the house was to their neighbors on either side.

On my street, there was never more than about 50 feet from one house to another, so in my mind, we were all pretty solidly middle class.

There were other parts of Wickliffe, up in "Wickliffe Heights" where I live now, for example, where people had big yards and lots of space between houses. I figured those must be the rich people.

I know better now that I actually live up here, but veterans of this area of town always laugh when I tell them what my perception of it was back in the 70s and 80s.

Of course, this is all a matter of perspective. Salaries in Northeast Ohio tend to lag behind many parts of the country, largely because the cost of living is so reasonable around here. What we paid for our house in Wickliffe might get us a two-room apartment in San Francisco. Might.

But when you start thinking globally, we middle-class folks in the U.S. live like kings and queens. The Washington Post a few years ago published a calculator that allowed you to compare your income with people in specific countries around the world.

Suffice it to say that most of us are Bill Gates in comparison with the citizens of certain nations.

So we should be grateful, middle class or otherwise. Growing up, I didn't know any better anyway, so I've always been pretty satisfied with where my family and I fall out, socioeconomically speaking.

Long live the bourgeoisie.