Dreaming the City

How do you fall in love with a city? I keep wondering this, wondering when and how it happened. How did Toronto cease to be that distant metropolitan centre (where the mayor had called in the army to deal with the snow, and the rest of us were never going to let them live it down), that ugly duckling cousin of Ottawa's? When did it become MY city?

It certainly wasn't intentional. Giving in to the gravitational pull of the city was an economic necessity, not a voluntary motion. Spouse and I (and the dog, and the cat, and the two rats, and the goldfish) moved to Markham because working five part-time jobs simultaneously - even in a city as lovely as Kingston - was killing me.

( Markham, as anyone will tell you, is not Toronto. )