back ends

Have you ever looked at the not-so-pretty side of your town? Not the seedy part of town, but the part that faces the parking lots and scrubbier, unkempt things. The carelessly painted bits and the broken pavement?

If you drive down towards the next town and park next to the blue bridge, across the road from the tied-up floating old boats that protestingly creak and tug at their moorings in the breeze, you can see across the river to the communal parking spots and the backs of some of the businesses there.

You can see, even though it's nearly six pm on a Thursday night, that both the hardware store and the notions shop are still doing a brisk business, and that the park is studded with knots of older kids too cool to go on the swings or the slide but eager to use the picnic tables and old benches to chat with their friends.

Look, there are the fading murals on the buildings - aren't they beautiful? - and try to count the colours of all the shops you see.

You can watch in delight as a group of middle school boys file past, rampant in their coolness, suddenly shouting and pell-melling it toward the end of the long fishing pier, tossing off clothes and diving in like young seals.

You can grin at the scene before you, spread out before you like the present it is, and hear the echo of your delight in the sound of the river chuckling and slapping to itself as it flows into the varied blue of the nearby ocean.

Summer's here.