I’ve got a fun guest post up today at the always interesting You Are Here Stories — a site for stories centered around Place, around those places that have been important to us, to our communities. Please click on the last words of the excerpt to join me over there, even if all you want to see is a photo of me at age 12 (sweetly earnest and awkward).
In my forty-seven years, I’ve been all over the world, but all it takes are a few cues to haul me back to my childhood.
A certain sharp and damp and lumber-ish smell brings me to my grandparents’ farmhouse in Michigan (a smell it retains years after their deaths and despite my cousin’s attempts to eradicate it). Outcrops of red, grey, and black veins of Great Canadian Shield rock bring me back to camping trips and weeks at the cottage.
But the capital-P Place where I feel the instant settling of my spirit that says “home” is the big city sidewalk.
Settling the spirit might be an odd response to a place that’s loud and busy and can be crowded and chaotic, but that’s where I grew up: in the middle of the great city of Toronto, Canada. Truly in the middle: one block from the main north-south thoroughfare of Yonge Street, and two-thirds of the way up our subway line.