Tag: Vancouver

A Vancouver Neighbourhood

“The syrup of blackberry scent and sweet peas”

17th and Laurel Street, Vancouver, where Jennifer and I lived (house left), and fiery Phil and family’s house (right). (Jen and I had no fence or palm trees in the front yard. The new owners changed our front garden soon after they moved in. The front walkway though is the same one I built.)
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The Golden City

Driving off the ferry at Tsawwassen, we catch our first glimpse of Vancouver, tiny against the Lions and the North Shore Mountains in the background, the expanse of farmland in the fore.

The dream of a golden city

It is nestled between rock, forest, water, fertile earth and sky of billowy clouds. It nurtures me still, 11 years after leaving it for Pender Island.… Continue reading

The Gingham Tablecloth at Nick’s

Nicks's Spaghetti House on Commercial Drive.

I’ve been thinking of how a sensory experience — an image, a taste, a sound — can trigger a flood of memories, long forgotten, that transport you instantly to another time or place.

How Marcel Proust tastes a madeleine cookie at the beginning of Remembrance of Things Past. He is overtaken with a feeling, “an exquisite pleasure … something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.”… Continue reading