Miriam, your perspective reminds me very much of the style of painting my great grandmother adopted to record her own memories. Below is a painting she created. She was a self-taught artist, and as such, developed her own way of portraying space. She has several similar paintings. She would attach notes on her work to signboards (lower right-hand corner in this painting). This one reads, "I left Russia 1912. A street in Chernigov as I remember it."

A livingroomscape, and a Kennedy campaign stop in an immigrant neighbourhood in Los Angeles from Frida Brownstone: