folio

We spent the day in our old neighbourhood, visiting longtime friends — the last remaining there.

Naturally we were left reflecting that it’s not the area we knew. Well, of course not, for we moved away nearly nineteen years ago.

At lunchtime, we visited the mosque too and those feelings were the same. No familiar faces, that humble converted warehouse of old replaced by a grand purpose-built house of prayer.

The neighborhood has changed. Perhaps it’s for the best: for a few years that stretch of road seemed rundown; now it seems to have returned to life.

As for us: our life is elsewhere now. We’ve lived here as long as I lived up north before it. Our time in that neighborhood was merely a period of transition and transformation between two worlds.

We were young then, setting out in life, just married. So much has happened in the period that followed. We visited our first home mostly just to annoy our son, who moaned, “Here we go again!”

But really our lives are wrapped up in this locality. Without those brief years spent there, we would not have the family we have now. It was our destiny.

These are my reflections anyway, whenever we return to this neighbourhood, forty minutes from home. It’s where our lives were made.