On a summer 3 year-old Tuesday I sit on the backyard blanket trying to find the jet plane high up and out at the limit of sight way ahead of its roaring tail while Mother goes to get the milk and the cucumber sandwiches from the kitchen of the new house my father has built with the pump at the sink and cistern underneath where the roots of the poplar tree that shades me will be slowly dying of exposure in the hot dry sun in the next door excavation where a new neighbour will soon begin to build, tearing out those roots that stitch our land together in our little country village, all of whose homes I will come to know on my paper route, the fussy impatient ones and Christmas tip generous souls waiting until I have read the whole paper before starting my rounds, entering myself into the fabric of a wider social blanket of 1950s Ontario just at the edge of Toronto so soon to burst out of its Hogtown corral and smother us all in its busy quilt of strip-malls, billboard ads and farmland-hungry subdivisions where there will be no time for picnics of cucumber sandwiches on blankets under backyard shade where Mother’s time is all my own.

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