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We had Nick’s follow-up appointment with the oncologist earlier this week. He’ll have check-ups every 3 months for the next couple of years and then every 6 months until the 5-year mark. Because he had advanced lymphoma, there’s a 15% chance of a recurrence, but that number goes down dramatically after the first year or two.

After his appointment, we drove to Georgetown for the first time since last fall. Explaining why this was an emotionally-charged visit for me requires a bit of back story (or maybe I just want to tell the back story).

We moved to Georgetown from Winnipeg 44 years ago, just before my 10^th birthday. Our new street, Flamingo Court, backed onto a ravine and had nine houses, seven of which had kids around the same age as us (the other two houses provided me with babysitting jobs). We played Four Square and Hide & Seek, held carnivals, rode bikes, chased the Dickie Dee cart down the street to buy ice cream and spent endless hours in the woods building forts, climbing trees, skipping stones and eating crab apples. Most of the time, our parents had no idea where we were or what we were doing – we went home when the street lights came on.

Our family had no relatives east of Winnipeg, so the neighbours became our family (both literally and figuratively as it turned out). We celebrated holidays together and created our own annual traditions. Whoever was around at Christmas was invited to join us for turkey dinner, desserts and a rousing game of Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit or Spoons.

When I was 13, my dad was transferred out west so we said tearful goodbyes to our Flamingo Court family and moved to Kelowna, BC. Three months after we’d moved into our mountainside home in the beautiful Okanagan Valley, the real estate agent called to say we’d finally received a firm offer on our house in Georgetown. My parents said, ‘thanks, but we’ve changed our minds’. My dad quit his job and we rented a U-Haul and drove back across the country to 6 Flamingo Court.

The following year, a new family with a bunch of older boys moved onto the street. One of them – we called him ‘the cute one’ – would be outside in his denim cut-offs, mowing the lawn or washing his Camaro. My sister and I would saunter past, trying to look sophisticated…or as sophisticated as you can while carrying a paper bag lunch to the school bus stop. The cute one, 20 years old at the time, was completely oblivious to our teeny-bopper charms.

Flash forward 15 years. I’ve moved back to Canada after three years studying in Stockholm and I’m living with my parents while I look for work. I decide to go out with the cute guy from the house on the corner, the only obstacles being that he hasn’t asked me out, he lives in Ottawa, and I don’t know if he’s single…or anything else about him really…but I’d made a decision and I firmly believed that the universe would cooperate.

When Ray (the cute one, if you haven’t figured that out by now), came home from Ottawa for the holidays, he and his family stopped in for the traditional Christmas desserts and games. He was apparently no longer oblivious to my charms and called a couple of days later to ask me out. We had a nice dinner in Toronto but he thought we were at different life stages and had no plans to ask me out again.

Being blissfully unaware of his (lack of) intentions, the universe and I continued on our mission. I called and told Ray I was meeting friends in Ottawa in February and would he like to meet up while I was in town (I had no such plans but that didn’t seem relevant). After he agreed to see me, I made plans to get together with friends in Ottawa in February. On that second date, we skated on the canal, had our first argument, and then Ray fell head over heels in love and asked if I could stay in town for a few more days. We got married a year later. That’s my version of the ‘how I met your father’ story. Ray’s may vary slightly.

All that to say, coming back to Flamingo Court, for the first time since selling our family home, was…strange, to say the least. We stayed with Ray’s mom at #2, while strangers went about their lives in #6 as though nothing was wrong with that. I sat by the swimming pool at #4, looking over at our old back yard, and half expected my dad to walk up to the fence and start the back-and-forth banter with his buddy next door.

On this street, it takes about 30 years before you’re no longer referred to as the ‘new’ neighbours or as living in, say, “the McLaren’s old house” (though, frankly, #3 will always be the McLaren’s old house to me). The people who moved into our house asked the neighbours for a picture of my parents. They’d heard them talked about so much that they wanted to get a better feel for who they were (they may have been looking for the halos).

We had a pizza gathering at #5 so we could catch up with the neighbours and it was comforting to be around people who love, miss and remember my parents too. Nick’s lost three grandparents on this Court in recent years, but he still has his grandma, plus a street full of surrogate grandparents to provide hugs, swimming pools, Wi-Fi and pizza parties. He’s gotten quite used to hanging out with people 50 to 70 years his senior.

This was just a short visit but in a two-day span we managed to see my brother and sister-in-law, my sister and brother-in-law, our Flamingo Court ‘family’, three of Ray’s step-siblings, Ray’s cousin-once-removed and her family, two step-nephews and their families, plus friends from Collingwood. We also spontaneously dropped in to say hello to one of my dad’s coffee/beer buddies after his daughter posted a pic of them watching the World Cup game at a local pub. We’ll be back in August to see the people we missed this time around.

Nick checked out ahead of us and took a train to Whitby to visit Danielle while Ray and I are spending a couple days at my sister and brother-in-law’s place.