It's a mailbox. Newspapers used to give them out to promote their paper.

We had one at the end of our driveway. More for rural/semi rural houses in the middle of nowhere with a long walk to the door. We lived in an undeveloped area of Kanata. https://twitter.com/NoJayD30/status/1289856393684557825

It was rural . Nothing else there except farm fields. A church.

A two lane highway we used to drive to Renfrew to see my Grandmother (yes brother, your gut feeling is correct: I lace almost every tweet with pokes of guilt aimed at you and your family! Is it working yet? )

I'm getting so good at subtle mental assaults of guilt.

It's actually fun.

Shockingly, no I was not raised Catholic.

Ba dum tssssss.

HA!
(I spend almost all my time alone, if I didn't amuse myself with lame jokes I'd go stark raving mad )

Right. Back to the point.

It looks desolate. City folk who visited from Ottawa or Toronto thumbed their nose at us.

My Oshawa grandmother's reaction:

"How could children be happy here? Good God is that a grave yard?!"

Yes.

Yes it is a graveyard.

And the concept that a graveyard was scary - and it was creepy that we could see it from our bedroom windows - did not exist in our minds until Grandma made a fuss about it.

Thanks Grams. Facepalm.

(She often did not consider self-defeating consequences before spoke. )

Of course my grandmother could not have been more wrong.

It was the IDEAL place for children.

Every day was a new adventure. Every day was magic.

The big open sky.

The sounds and smells of nature. The power of a moon's light.

The thrill of a rink in your backyard.

It was a glorious time for us as children. We had so much freedom to explore, discover and imagine in the giant open spaces.

Our parents could let us venture out into the beyond of fields and trees and keep watch on us from a long distance.

Suburbia robs you of that freedom.

The concept that winter is a dark depressing time to endure, did not exist here. Winter was magic. It was awe. It was full of wonder and beauty.

Darkness wasn't scary. It was magical.

These nightly walks were total bliss.

It wasn't until we moved to southern Ontario and the GTA - Ajax - when I was 7-8 years old, that winter wasn't winter anymore.

You felt darkness. The magic was gone. It was sloshy and dirty and uncomfortable.

We were no longer existing on nature's rythm. It was cement and cars

On the flip side because winter was zapped of its natural bliss and joy in suburbia, summers became more blissful.

Because winters here felt darker than rural Kanata (maybe the effect of the moon's light was more powerful there?), we yearned for Spring in a way we didn't before.

So, we adjusted and found new joys in Ajax. For me it was board games and baseball with Mike, JD and Terry.

We lived within a few houses of each other, same age/grade/school/friends.

We checked on each other in Wave 1. Terry offered to risk himself to get my family groceries

I'll never forget that.

Terry told me if we were in need or in danger he would help. That bond formed on these suburban sidewalks 35 years ago as children, lives today.

We lost the magic of Kanata.

But it was replaced with magical things like a ball diamond, and friendship.