Beneath the Skin of This Street

My dad grew up in the house I live in. He's never considered himself a storyteller, but I've treasured every mention of his childhood in the old East End.

Take, for example, brick streets. I grew up scrambling over pink granite boulders among white pines and scrubby oaks up around Parry Sound. So my dad's occasional mention of the milk-wagon pulled by a single horse, clattering over the streets of this neighbourhood has always been an exotic image for me.

I've seen a few red brick streets, elsewhere in the city. But the red bricks of MY street existed only in my dad's stories... until this summer. Thanks to the road crew that's been crunching and grinding for the last few weeks, the asphalt has now been scraped back in a few places. And guess what?

There are bricks beneath the skin of this street! The old street, the street of story and of memory, has been lying underneath the surface this whole time. Funny what you find, when you peel away the layers.

That's my van in the picture, with the canoe on the roof, calling me to some happy adventure among the woods and the waters of the north. But right now, I'm hearing instead the sound of a horse and wagon, and just imagining the feel of a cool glass bottle in my hands.

And I'm still right at home.