Grandma had once told me about her childhood home.

It was a cozy, ranch-style house in what used to be the Midwest. She described having a huge garden planted below her bedroom window, and that she would watch her tomatoes and carrots everynight like clockwork, anxiously waiting for them to grow.

She would have to drive with her father in something called a “Ford” down to a nursey 30 whole minutes away to pick up soil and tools. Imagine that? To think of how slow transportation used to be! I would get bored to death on the journey over, I imagine.

Apparently, her father owned the very lost model of a “Ford” ever produced. Which is the original branding for what is now the Q-90. It had a rusty metal pipe that would blow black smoke everywhere. If the windows were rolled down, and they were driving at a decent enough pace—at least 35 miles per hour—her eyes would water from the fumes.

I couldn’t imagine choking on the very own air we depend on, endangering not only ourselves, but the very structure of the city itself. Altough, she says every vehicle used to do the same thing. No one batted an eye at such a display. Some days she has a particular gleam in her eye, like she misses it the toxic sting of it.

I sometimes stop on my walks to school and take in the sights around me. The bright orange solar lights above, the whisping trees lining my path. If I close my eyes at night, I can depend on the light hum of the 8th Street Hydro Train to lull me to sleep.

One day, i’ll remember this world fondly for what it was, just as my grandmother does. I hope to be content in my nostalgia for the world I live in, just like she is, but I get worried sometimes. Society has changed so rapidly in a such short time, will it be too fast for me to catch up? Will it slip between my fingers before I even get a chance to realize it’s leaving me behind? Will I one day sit outside and yearn for the very same plants around me now?

I wonder if my grandmother ever had the same thought, that we may all haunted by places and feelings we can never return to.