So Goes Time, So Goes Life

Last week I learned the house I left in central Toronto, twenty years ago, is being demolished. This isn't just any house. This house was built for my great grandfather and was the home where my daughters grew, a solid, large house that reflected the time in which it was built.

The house had always remained in the family, welcoming every generation, my mother and her sister as children, my cousins in their later childhood and teenage years, my grandmother, aunts, uncles and all their pets through time. The house was loved and had many friends.

We celebrated the house with a big backyard party, fireworks and all, the week before I left for this loved place by the sea.

It is funny but the concept of it being no more has a rightness. Everything inevitably comes  to an end. It is difficult to see the essence of the old houses in the neighbourhood being renovated into oblivion.

However it was difficult reading

Demolition/Content Sale - Midtown (Yonge and Lawrence)
83 Glengrove Ave W

Hosted this Saturday July 20th 10am-3pm. 

Bring Your Own Tools.

The house is now gone. The memories good and bad live on with us. The neighbourhood now houses more and more of the shakers and movers of the city. Their lifestyles require much more of a house than my great grandfather could ever imagined.

I cry for the gardens. There is a picture of my aunt as a child in about 1918 standing under an impressive maple tree. When my children were small they could put their ears against the thick bark to hear the fairy elevators going up and down inside. 

It was under this tree I made a wild flower garden. The trilliums came from the farm where my other grandmother grew up, the periwinkle from my Aunt Lilah who loved all things living, the ferns and a lady slipper from the cottage, several umbrella plants from the sides of rural roads and of course some of my mother's infamous Niagara red wiggling worms. I hope they and theirs survive.

The other garden that was important to me was between the old, perfect pink, climbing roses, that through time had made it past the second floor. It was here I planted special flowers to honour special people and special occasions. It was so difficult to say good bye to this garden. I don't think there is a chance,  the plants will survive the mighty machines that are now preparing this tiny drop of the ever expanding city for newness. I do hope someone thought to take a shovel to rescue one or two of them.

So goes time. So goes life.

I think it is now time to go out to work in the garden, I dreamed into existence on long winter nights. My mother gave me money, for my fiftieth birthday, to make the dream a reality. This garden brings enough joy.