The Jersey of the GTA

Location: Aurora, ON

Welcome--for those of you that are new (I flatter myself I will have readers one day), please read my Introductory post. Context works wonders.

I arrived home in Aurora yesterday morning. It is a suburb of Toronto, and through the years has been graced with several nicknames; the great white North, Farmville, and "the Jersey of the GTA". But regardless of how much it has been made fun of, it was nice to be home, and it was a beautiful day, so I decided that I would take a break from my final papers to take some photos of our yard.

When you live in a Suburbox, you definitely maximize for efficiency. My dad grew up in the country, and loves to garden. We have three tiny yards at my house (we live on a corner lot so things are a little tricky in terms of space) and my dad uses every inch of the back and side yard for his gardening 'corporation'. The first picture is of the greenhouse that he made using our MP's election signs, bricks, and tarp in the yard adjacent to our driveway.

The second image is the tiny alleyway between my house (left) and the neighbor's. My dad paved it with cobblestones and those red shelves on the left he uses as a nursery for baby plants. If you look straight ahead (past the potters on the left) you can see where the greenhouse is.

In our back yard, my dad made my sisters a 'treehouse', which is really a glorified wooden box on stilts with a tree coming out of the floor. It's about 10 feet up from the ground if you include the wall, and my sisters have taken to doing a neighborhood role call from up there. I just love it, as do the girls. Below is a picture of the tree sticking out of the floor.

In the branches of the tree is this nifty anchor windchime. I'm not sure where we got it, but my dad loves to collect little things like this; in this case he reminds me of the lady from the beginning of Harriet the Spy.

I appreciate you joining me on this sunny day in Suburbia. Tomorrow, if I can get them uploaded, I will share the wildlife sensation that is the Robin's nest in a pine tree. It's not a big fan of me to say the least!