Originally Posted by an old poem embedded in thoughts on my mother

I've eventually discovered that she and I were both born at the late Grace Hospital in Ottawa's Hintonberg (fourth of seven, and the first of her siblings hospital-born), that she went to grade school at Elgin Street School, where my own daughter went to kindergarten, and lived on Gilmour Street until her mid-twenties, when the whole clan moved themselves down to the Ridgemont/Alta Vista area, where my grandmother remained until the mid-1990s.233 gilmour streetmy mother own & baseball diamond, homeaint what it used to, last rites of housesthen not so, set & set uponruncible, mountain high & the streetcontained everyone, tender disgust& cicadas sweet rapture, august moonof red summer silk contradictions, plastic lightof fathers, her own a cold cigaretteplantation, stroke or no stroke, aform of erasure; snarl of smokesuspicious materials, brokeback coloniesanticipation of shores upon shores upon shoreonce speaking clear, they moved; obtaina clearer speaking picture, gilmour torn& torn down; immediately movedtheir material restriction impeded, & builtin nineteen sixty-six a tall brownoval ship in harbour minutes, impressive& leaving them no lesson to meetI was intrigued by the combination of these histories, that the whole of my father's clan could be traced through three properties side-by-side, and my mother's, through properties in Coburg, Kemptville and Brockville, and various Ottawa locations, all of which were torn down after the family moved, as the last torn down for the sake of a smaller house on the same lot, another torn for the sake of the on-ramp to the 417 at Lees Avenue, and this one on Gilmour Street, torn down to built the Canadian Public Service Building at 233 Gilmour Street.