Don’t fall for the myth that we all need to live on farms. You can forge a different way of living wherever you are:

We do live across from a conservation area now and have farms at our back, but for over 15 years we had the opposite experience. When our first child was born twenty years ago, we decided to move close to family. For us this meant choosing to live in the suburban sprawl north of Toronto. The town we moved to was literally at the bottom of the list of places we would have chosen to live in Canada. There was too much concrete, the streets were lined with ghostly empty sidewalks and homogenous strip malls, and a car was required to get almost anywhere.

So we walked everywhere. Planted a flower garden along the sidewalk (even though no one else did). Camped out on our back yard patio with the kids. Held our birthday parties at the local park. Went Christmas carolling door-to-door. We basically acted contrary to common norms and in the process managed to forge community and a different way of living within the monotony of suburbia.

Aerial shot of our former neighbourhood north of Toronto