Before the green wall disappears

Touch it while you can
London, ON
February 2022
This photo originally shared on Instagram

I grew up in a suburb just north of Montreal (Chomedey!) that was still being carved out of the wilderness.

One of my earliest memories revolved around my street, and how if you walked down to the end of it and turned the corner, everything just...ended. The road trailed off and the forest began.

To get to the community pool at the local Y, we had to walk past the end of the road and take a gravelly path that we called "The Rocky Way". I never saw any dead bodies along the way, but 3-year-old me distinctly remembers the rusted hulk of a VW Beetle abandoned under a giant tree.

Over the years, the forests gave way to streets and construction and houses and civilization. Eventually, the edge of town was pushed so far out that forests and fields were no longer part of day-to-day life.

And as those houses got built, I noticed how they'd evolve from foundations to framed structures to insulated enclosures to fully formed, bricked-in places where real people eventually lived. And I imagined the folks who eventually moved in never got to see them in their partially-built state.

No one stood on a sidewalk, looked at a half-finished wall and thought, "Gee, it'll never look like this again."

Except for me. I stood on sidewalks then, and I stand on them now. Or, in this case, in a local mall's parking lot as a new infill building went up.

Before the green-ish insulation was entombed forever in brick and concrete, I thought a fast photo shoot would freeze the memory.

There doesn't need to be a why.

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Related:

Return to the Dirty Bakery, October 2011

A crumbling icon fades to black, May 2016

Reflections from a speeding train, August 2019

This used to be my playground, August 2013

Flying over the old 'hood, June 2013