Town Again
Town, my new town, the town I go to when I’ve got town things to town about town, was very badly set back by the flooding earlier this year. A thing that is like to happen again and again for as long as I live near to the place. For the most part I’m on a hill so I mostly have to worry about looking at these things and not enduring them directly, though there was a bit of detritus floating through my basement while water surged through the shops.
Town seems back to normal, the route I walk when I want to shop has returned to the way nature intended it. I walk by the record store because they’re too expensive for me to really consider, I peruse the vintage shop and walk away with one thing every third or fourth visit, and I pick up some nonsense from our favorite antique shop; these are all on the same one way street. Then I turn back around, eye the record shop for a second time on my way to the book shop and the pastry shop next to it. The most disappointing shift has been that the pastry shop no longer makes laminated dough, and a pastry shop without laminated dough isn’t a pastry shop worth going to.
It feels nice that things are back to normal. It makes me excited for summer when Abby and I can go on that jaunt together with the finest new addition: Robinia. The fact that that girl has not known summer but only fall and this poor immitation of an early winter is as startling as it is exciting and a bit scary. The summers ahead of her are going to be lovely, even as the world turns itself to flood and rebuilds and rebuilds and rebuilds.
I think the rebuilding itself is part of the beauty, or at least it had better be, we’ve got loads of it ahead of us.