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I am out for a walk today in my neighbourhood in Vancouver.  It is a perfect fall day in the city, blue sky, fresh breeze, about 16 degrees. As I stride along the sidewalks, scuffing at the smashed chestnuts that have fallen from the huge trees I pass under, I can't help but think about the city I live in and how much I love it.

Crushed chestnuts on the sidewalk

People say all the time that Vancouver has changed so much, citing the traffic, the expense,  the influx of immigrants, the old buildings being torn down, the new buildings going up...the bike lanes. But on a day like today, walking between West 22nd Avenue where I live and Broadway so much feels the same. 

My sister and I moved to Vancouver when I was fresh out of high school and she had just graduated college. We both had jobs in the downtown core and it made sense to leave our hometown of Richmond behind. To our delight we found ourselves in an apartment in Kitsilano. It was love at first sight. The beach, the funky shops of West 4th Ave, the bars and restaurants. What more could a couple of young, single women want? 

Richmond is flat, and when we lived there many of the areas were newly built, the trees spindly and held up with stakes, the houses an assortment of the five different plans that the builder allowed. But in Vancouver.... the trees were huge, the houses  old and unique, streets undulated up and down giving onto fabulous views of the mountains and ocean, and the beaches were full of people like us. Heaven.

I left the city almost a dozen years later to raise a family and then moved back with my husband and grown kids seven years ago. It felt like coming home. Even though I had grown up in Richmond, spent twenty years in Tsawwassen, the years that I lived in Vancouver had imprinted itself on me. It was where I truly grew up. My father spent part of his childhood in the West End, selling papers on the street corners and my mother went to UBC almost seventy years ago. I feel like there is a little bit of my family DNA here.

Forty-two years after I first moved into Kitsilano I am walking its streets again.  Going to the same library at MacDonald and West 8th Ave. where I used to check out books, renewing my drivers license at the same Motor Vehicle branch where I received my very first driver's license.

The sidewalk stamp at 14th and Stephens

As I walk, I look for the date stamped into the sidewalk below me that tells me when it was laid. Some say 2010, or 1992 but many read 1929 or 1931. Vancouver is not an old city and despite the feeling of some that it has been wiped clean like a white board and replaced, small signs like this remind me that some of the early days still remain. The sun filters through the same huge maples, chestnuts and oak trees that have been dumping their boatloads of leaves on these streets for decades.

Big, old chestnut tree

 Many of the funky old homes have been discreetly turned into triplexes and quadruplexes but they still stand. Yes, quite a few homes have been replaced but the unattractive boxes from the fifties and the horrible "Vancouver specials" from the sixties that went are no great loss as far as I am concerned.  Many of the new homes in my neighbourhood are a vast improvement. And their picture perfect  gardens are a delight. 

Broadway now holds Vietnamese and Thai restaurants where Greek and Chinese ones used to stand but the feel is the same. Pizza shops, bakeries, produce stores and banks line the street just as they did forty years ago. Change is inevitable, everything and everyone is in a constant state of change, but that is not a bad thing. I've changed a bit and I'm happy to see that Vancouver has, too. There are new places to explore, different cuisines to taste, more cultures to learn about. These are all good things.  When I'm strolling along Spanish Banks looking at the North Shore mountains or walking around Kits Point to the planetarium these changes all feel so small. They are just the spice that makes the dish. 

Avenue of Stars
Original artwork by Jill Charuk

When I first moved to Kits it was full of joggers, brown rice and people smoking pot, now it's yoga, quinoa and people smoking weed. The more things change the more they stay the same. So I embrace my Vancouver like an old friend, she has a new haircut, she's put on a few pounds and speaks a second language but her heart still welcomes me home.