Even after 5pm, life lingers on the streets in a soft hum in North York, Toronto. I’m used to roads settling into silence like the afternoon dust in our old suburban neighborhood. But here in Canada’s largest city, evenings have a liveliness of their own and I love it. People remain chatting in the Starbucks patio as the sun sets behind the buildings.
In Emily Climbs (book two of my holy trilogy), Emily says in the face of a very great opportunity to become a writer in New York, “Some fountain of living water would dry up in my soul if I left the land I love.” At seventeen I might have said the same–not half so eloquently, but stubborn in the childlike belief that the little lakeside neighborhood would always remain the place I called, in my heart, home. At twenty now, I walk down my new neighborhood in Toronto with curiosity and alertness, a surprising rush of life flooding my veins. A TD Bank faces a pizzeria, someone’s opened a French boutique beside a vintage shop, and there can be a Shoppers Drug Mart, Tim Hortons, and a NoFrills in one block. More children in strollers and dogs on leashes, and crosswalks stretch wide and far as the sea.
Alien streets and grown-up people would frighten me when I was ten. Now they strike me as interesting subjects to study and write about. As a young adult myself now I prefer busy avenues to quiet paths and a cafe to my room; sunny days to rainy afternoons, mystery to romance, change to routine. But in a way I’m more emotionally and physically sensitive to my environment than I ever was. Because where I would have once shrunk from a wide city avenue, I now find that it pumps my heart and gives me life.
