There were any number of moments when Sue Shishido Saffery might have realized that her modest personal project had taken on a life of its own, but it may have been when a woman she had never met before in person asked her to walk by a house in Kaimuki and snap a photo for her.

“It was the house she grew up in,” Shishido Saffery said. “She had moved away many years ago, and she was thrilled to see that it still looked the same.”

The request came in the midst of the government shutdown that left Shishido Saffery and thousands of other federal employees on furlough from Dec. 22 to Jan. 25.

Shishido Saffery, an administrative training coordinator for the Federal Aviation Administration, decided to use the involuntary time off to get a bit of fresh air, abandoning her indoor recumbent bike workouts for daily walks.

“The first week I walked Ala Moana Center and Kahala Mall and saw every after-Christmas sale,” she said. “But then boredom set in.”

And so she happily exchanged those exhausted sites of commerce for the sights and sounds of the neighborhood so central to her 61 years of life, taking long, leisurely walks around Kaimuki with camera at hand to snap a few photos of the area’s historic buildings, unique residential features and hidden art.

On Jan. 2 Shishido Saffery posted photos of Puu o Kaimuki Mini Park (the grassy expanse next to the Kaimuki Fire Station) and a painted traffic signal box outside the now-defunct Liliuokalani Elementary School on Waialae Avenue to “You Know You’re from KAIMUKI When…,” a public Facebook group established in 2011 that she had joined two or three years ago. The post drew more than a hundred responses and numerous comments from former Liliuokalani students and longtime Kaimuki residents.

The posts continued. Every day Shishido Saffery picked a different area of Kaimuki to explore and posted photos of what she found, from historic storefronts along the business district to unique plants growing out of the area’s characteristic, red-dirt-stained rock walls to tantalizing munchies from Kaimuki eateries new and old. Her longest walk was a 3-mile jaunt from Diamond Head to Kapahulu, but mostly she kept her explorations to a mile or so at a time.

Shishido Saffery’s ties to the area are well established, doggedly maintained and ever deepening.

Her family moved to the neighborhood when she was a child, and she attended Liholiho Elementary School, Kaimuki Intermediate (now Middle) School and Kaimuki High School before earning a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her earliest jobs were at Aotani Fountain and the next-door Kaimuki Jewel Shop. After 25 years living elsewhere on the island, she returned to her childhood home for good with her husband and two sons to care for her widowed mother in the last years of her life.

Shishido Saffery spent more than 20 years with the Kaimuki Lions Club before transferring to the Koko Head chapter last year. She also is a founding member and coordinator of the Maunaloa Neighborhood Security Watch, now in its 10th year.

With each new post, Shishido Saffery awakened long-dormant memories of Kaimuki past for scores of current and former neighborhood residents, who in turn shared their own personal experiences, old photos of businesses no longer around and updates on people whose networks of connection undergird the layers of gentrifying change.

The Facebook group already was a spirited space, animated by a diverse group of members whose grasp of neighborhood arcana and amazing recall of the names, faces, places and hidden treasures of Kaimuki span generations. Still, Shishido Saffery’s daily journal sparked an unexpected wave of response as current residents and those thousands of miles or many decades removed rhapsodized on the lost delights of Kwong On bakery and noodle shop, bemoaned the plague of “monster” homes, waxed nostalgic on the sight of red-painted steps and dropped names of old landmarks like Akita Store in Kapahulu, Shari’s Drive-In at Market City and the old Kress at the top of Waialae.

“I was shocked by the response,” Shishido Saffery said. “There were people who hadn’t been home in 40 years but whose memories of Kaimuki are still fresh. The posts brought people back to their childhoods and happy times.”

The interaction with commenters also brought Shishido Saffery to less familiar areas of Kaimuki, including a suggested trip to see the neighborhood- famous “fish and fan” designs that adorn a rock wall on Ocean View Drive and a stroll into Palolo Valley. During one walk Shishido Saffery was even invited inside Epiphany Church on 10th Avenue, where she photographed the building’s famous stained-glass windows.

Shishido Saffery posted her last entry Jan. 27, just before returning to her job at Honolulu Control Facility at Joint Base Pearl Harbor- Hickam. She still posts to the group when she can, but her miniature archive of walk journals stands as a singular reminder of the pull of memory and the impulse toward community both in the real Kaimuki and its virtual meeting place.

“I’m a Kaimuki girl at heart,” she said, aware now that she surely is not alone.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.