(Re)Visiting Family

I grew up in a house owned by my mother’s father, near where she grew up with her brother and two sisters. It was a close-knit neighbourhood - school, variety store, and park close by. My mother has long passed. Her remaining sister told me how the family would often walk to my great-grandparents’ house arriving in their backyard through a picket fence from the same park where I later played. I didn’t know my great-grandparents. I do remember as a boy visiting my aunt for her daughter’s first birthday party - a memory I recently revisited with my young cousin’s untimely passing. Revisiting the walk my mother’s family made, I was amazed to find a gate (now metal) to where my great-grandparents lived. I was also moved to realize that my aunt would have passed the house where, many years later, she first lived with her only child.