A new world takes shape

So much potential
Laval, QC
December 2018
This photo originally shared on Instagram

About a mile west of my mother's high-rise condo, as the crow flies, a new building slowly rises into the sky. My note yesterday about staring through distant windows and judging the folks on the other side got me thinking about the stories yet to be told in these boxes in the sky. So when I saw this skeleton of a building bathed in the late-afternoon setting sun, I felt a photo was called for.

Those of us lucky enough to grow up in a caring neighborhood appreciate what that must feel like, with neighbors who are so much more than neighbors, who know you, care about you, and are always there no matter what's going on in your own life. You feel indescribably comforted, protected, surrounded, and I was privileged to have lived in just such an area, a short walk to the right of the frame you see here. Canterbury Street was an idyllic oasis of calm, much like every other street, square, and crescent that surrounded it in this equally wistful, leafy suburb known as Chomedey.

For each of us, the world started and ended here, and all it took was a trip into the big city to the south, with its crowded streets, lack of green, and overwhelming noise, to appreciate returning home at the end of the day, knowing your peeps were ready and waiting to play another game of hide-and-seek beside the streetlight near your maple tree.

After this new building in a new neighborhood comes to life, it will doubtless become similarly idyllic for countless families over countless years, with countless stories yet to unfold. Decades from now, I hope they, too, can look back at their time here with similar wistfulness, thankful in the knowledge that their parents chose well, and in doing so influenced the trajectory of their lives in ways mere words can never explain.

For now, it's a construction site. But soon, it will become so much more.

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