I’ve been revisiting a place that no longer exists in the way it once did: my grandparents’ house, set back from a quiet road in rural Ontario, with a river at the edge of the garden and a rhythm that belonged to another time. (Link to document.)
Writing these memories wasn’t about reconstructing the past accurately, or even chronologically. It was about noticing what has endured. Not the large events, but the smaller ones: how light moved through rooms, how time stretched in childhood, how care was expressed through routine rather than words.
I’ve come to believe that memory doesn’t preserve everything evenly. It keeps what mattered, often without explaining why. What remains are fragments: sounds, gestures, objects shaped by hand, and the feeling of being held within an ordered, attentive world.
This piece is a gathering of those fragments. It’s written for family, but also for anyone who carries a place within them that continues to inform how they see, move, and care.
Some houses disappear. Others remain, quietly, in the way we remember how to be.
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