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in which I ponder

~fiolajane

My favourite library from childhood still exists but has been refurbished so many times there's almost nothing left that child-me would recognise. The shape of the building silhouetted against orange sunset clouds, perhaps, but the sounds and the smells are all modern and entirely without soul.

My old high school just got a new science building. To achieve that they leveled the old science building, the canteen (aka cafeteria), the hall, half the language department, and swallowed a huge chunk of the remaining green space. It took two years to put the new building in. Where did the kids do assembly or get their sausage rolls in the meantime?

And my old German teacher found me on facebook. She must be much younger than I thought. She's got grandkids now, but I still remember her telling us 16-year-olds that if we were going to have kids to do it before we were thirty, because after that it would be impossible to think of names that didn't remind us of someone we loathed.

Oddly, we had two kids called Hunter in our year. That was a pretty way-out name at the time. Or maybe we were insular? The wave of Taylors and Parises had already started, but we weren't aware. Yes, I think we were insular.

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~xiu wrote:

because after that it would be impossible to think of names that didn't remind us of someone we loathed

Loved this hahaha

~kavehorvanya wrote (thread):

i'm glad this site doesn't have a like system but if it did i would give this post a like

~ss wrote (thread):

I’m beginning to see this where I grew up too, and I’m not even particularly old yet. The coffee shop me and my friends frequented was replaced by a new, larger location with a drive-thru. The new one simply doesn’t have the same coziness and atmosphere that the old one did (oddly enough the new location also seats less people despite being 4 times the size). At least it’s a better fate than the GameStop that was next to the old cafe, which got turned into a cigar store.

My old elementary school has also almost doubled in size, which I guess is nice because it means more classroom space, but at the same time it took away an entire field, and out of what little green space is left the student’s aren’t allowed to use most of it during recess anymore for safety. The kiddos will never get to experience the mad rush for the first honeysuckle flowers that grew on the back fence.

So much of where I grew up is still the same, yet the places I really care about happen to be the ones that have substantially changed…