Wonderland and 9 Mile Road

Paused at the crossroads
Middlesex County, ON
September 2013

I had come back to this intersection for reasons I don't quite yet understand. As I was driving home from a day's worth of meetings, I realized my path home would take me past this place where I had been just a couple of months earlier.

Like the whispered voices that often seem to pull us in one direction or another (shades of Field of Dreams, I'll admit) I soon found myself parking the car alongside the deserted road, reaching for my camera and stepping into the still-soft dirt of the unfinished roadway construction site.

I didn't stay long because my family was waiting just a few kilometers away, and I missed them. It had been a good day of opportunity-hunting and foraging, and I couldn't wait to get home and share everything I had seen and experienced. But before I got there, I felt the need to be here, to stand in the dirt, bathed by the setting sun, and drink in a place that, for reasons I'll someday share here and elsewhere, has become eerily significant to me.

Hard to believe a perfectly painted landscape in the midst of a facelift would mean that much to anyone. Hard to fathom the power of a geographic coordinate, and how comforting it can be to return to a place where life can literally go down one path or another. Funny how life works, sometimes.