First Day Back

One of the nice things I have to say about Stouffville is that is smells wonderful. Green and light yellow and water. A grey brown smell coming up from the deck now, too, under the midday sun.

Maybe it doesn't smell like this all the way through the town, but my mom's house backs onto the resevoir. The world is a place full of wonders, that I can be sitting outside, listening to the red-wing blackbirds and watching a big shaggy lab chase the swans back onto the pond at the same time I am blogging you.

Odd that my spring of travel ends here, in a boring ex-farm town starting to get swallowed up by Toronto. Though maybe boring is harsh now, 15 years after high school. If I moved here now, I might find it fine.

No. That's not true.

I don't really understand small towns. The city, yes of course, I was an urbanite long before I got to live urbanely. And the country, too, I understand forest and fields, I miss them, very much, having grown up kind of in the country and most definitely in the middle of both of those things. I consider myself lucky that when we were turned loose to play in the summer, it was in the Vivian Forest, and with an adult's hindsight, can't fathom all those hours complaining by Karen's pool that there was nothing to do. Nothing to do? She lived two blocks away, literally, from hectare upon hectare of regional forest. We wasted it.

But small towns? The disadvantages of the city - lots of people, traffic, close neighbours; the disadvantages of the country - not that much going on, a lack of community options, a tendency to small-mindedness. Not for me.

That may just be left over from growing up in one, hard to say, but I almost always want to get out as soon as I get in.

++

As a side note: re-reading the entries of the last little while over, it seems I've lost my sense of humour. Not feeling the funny these days. It'll come back soon, I promise, and I'll start being more entertaining.