The spaces we move through, inhabit, depend upon, avoid and imagine over a lifespan are both countless and often underrepresented when it comes to the memories they capture. What kind of meaning do these same locations hold for others? How many important moments and transformations has each place facilitated, witnessed? What kinds of uses have they provided for past visitors?
The details and indeed entire chapters of these microhistories tend to get lost through generations, changes of season, and the shifting of our focus toward the things structured to keep us occupied and indifferent. Time disintegrates behind our backs without so much as a snapped photograph or kept record through any other mode of inscription. Our inspiration for starting (and hopefully keeping) this shared blog is to bring new life to the places in our city that provide meaning to us. By us, we mean the two of us – a look at our native Montreal from the vantage of a young couple wishing to stay, and who recognize that the potential for fulfillment, growth, and happiness are not far outside (and inside) our door.
Our purpose is not solely to tread backwards and resuscitate some of the unsung personal memories associated with slices of our landscape – a tall order – and neither is it to avoid extracting some of their cultural richesse to benefit our own curiosity and that of others. We start today and move forward, with the gift of technology at our disposal, to record the often otherwise blurred and eventually muted meanings of the present. The multiple trails we create, the traces of ourselves we leave behind, form a map in the colour of our continuously reinvented cultural existence, an intuitiveness and adaptability without which frictionless passage in this city is not possible. But the act of walking these trails is what motivates us, and is very much part of the act of living, experiencing, feeling, creating, socializing, and having fun.
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