I grew up in mid-town Toronto, between bustling Yonge Street and quiet brown townhouses, with their little gardens full of flowers and bees. The Beltline and countless parks weave their way through streets full of kids with dogs, smiling crossing guards, and colourful cafes. I lived on the twelfth floor of a white brick building. From our window we could see the face of another tall white building on the other side of a big dog park. To the south were variously sized buildings that stretched, glistening, into the distance. In the North corner of my view was a quiet retirement home framed by the black buildings of Eglinton Avenue. To the west, I could only see the tops of old trees that turned colour in the Fall, over which little airplanes passed by endlessly. I used to sit at my window for hours, just after sunset, counting the airplanes and making up little stories about the people in them. Whenever I got in trouble and was sent to my room, the little flashing dots on the horizon would keep me company until my parents forgave me.

In front of that red-gold expanse was my elementary school, Davisville Public School. Divided into a series of attached square segments, it looked like a spaceship dropped straight from the moon. Each segment was fitted with a white roof that zig-zagged this way and that. From the centre, a tall brown chimney reached toward me. My school had windows for eyes and doors for a mouth, and the chimney in the middle was like a top hat. When I was really little, my parents would usher me across the street to school, and we would always wave hello to the always-smiling middle aged Filipino crossing guard. Every morning I would get to school late and the doors would almost always be locked from the outside already. The nice playground supervisor would always open the door for me with a smile and a joke, while the mean one would yell at me (to which I responded by purposefully bugging her during lunch break). Once inside, I would climb the hanging stairwells to my classrooms. Truth be told, these stairs were incredibly scary to scale as a tiny six year old who was (and still is) scared of heights. I always thought they were cool, though, because they were so different from everything else that existed. They seemed to just float, apart from the walls with each step separate from the next, lit up by the light coming through the windows that stretched non-stop from the first to third floors.

To me, my school yard was divided into five parts: a slightly mottled, tree-lined field; a smaller gravelly field with golden trees, our resident hawk, and flowering vines everywhere; a red and blue playscape that I got a billion splinters from; a little red brick wall where we played one-touch and used as a capture-the-flag jail; and various concrete areas where we had those basketball hoops that look more like over-sized blue plastic tulips than anything else. Halfway between the schoolyard and my window was a tall, delicately leaning tree that I could see from every window in our apartment. Every morning, I would run to my window and say good morning to the tree. I named it the Weather Tree, because I could tell if it was going to be a windy day or not by how much its branches were waving. I had complete faith in that tree for all things weather related: it always told me exactly how cold or hot it would be. One day, I looked out the window as usual, but the Weather Tree wasn’t there to wave back at me. Some forestry people had come by to cut its branches so it couldn’t wave anymore. I moved away in grade 10, four years ago. Right before I moved away, they tore down some of the brown townhouses with the flowering gardens full of bees. Within these four years, they built two new mid-rise glass buildings in the dog park I lived beside. The parents of one of my childhood friends owned a little convenience store beside a Starbucks at the main intersection. They sold that store and moved away too.

Earlier this year, I was driving down Yonge Street, past the area I used to live in. I looked out and realized that the chimney was missing. Turns out, the TDSB had decided to tear down my school after many years of the community fighting to protect it. Truth be told, the building was way past capacity and the infrastructure was crumbling. I remember when we were taking our grade 6 EQAO, one of the tiles in our third floor classroom ceiling came loose. Baby birds came flying out of the attic above and wouldn’t leave us alone for the rest of the day. That bird infested, spaceship shaped school with the woodchip playscape isn’t there anymore. The convenience stores and parking lots that make up the school yard’s west border will be replaced with a modern school building with a much larger capacity and no hanging staircases. Even though the area has changed so much since I moved away years ago, I still feel comforted whenever I visit. More than any other place I have ever lived, my wasp infested midtown Toronto with the willows and the grassy parks will always be my home. It’s a place where the traffic is always terrible but nobody ever honks. It’s a place where skinny houses with long backyards and tall buildings with glass balconies, retirement homes filled with Triscuits and elementary schools full of baby birds, and a Sobeys with a huge bakery section and convenient stores stocked with ripe bananas can all co-exist in some ever-changing story of neighbourhood change.