Touring storyscapes

I’m here in Peterborough, Ontario, where my partner Caitlin and I met and where we lived 15 years ago.   Today I drove past a place I lived in up in Lakefield, north of the city, where I took a room at the tender age of just-gone-eighteen.   After 20 years, the house is still there and the town remarkably familiar.

We are travelling here and to Ottawa and Toronto to visit places we have lived so that our kids (now aged 9 and 5) can get a sense of some of the life their parents had before they were born.   It’s remarkable to visit a place – even after 15 or 20 years – and be completely unable to see it as it is.   Instead I see a storyscape in front of me with many places so full of meaning and cloaked in personal history that it is impossible to see them as my children are seeing them, as if for the first time.   Good practice, this seeing.
It has been an interesting trip today, and will get more interesting tomorrow as we visit Trent University, with narratives running in my head as my kids squirm in the heat in the back seat of the car not seeing the point in any of this when they could be swimming in the river instead!

Anyway, this is the reason for light posting, and the light spell will continue for another week or so.

Oh and by the way, free wireless at the Holiday Inn on George Street in Peterborough.   Gotta love that.

[tags]Peterborough [/tags]