It's a long holiday weekend.  Edgar and I are installed on the front veranda in the shade, dozing to the sounds of industrious neighbours madly scrambling away at dirt and plants in hot sun.  Obviously to the (NDG) manor born, I'm more suited to a long cool drink, crushed white linen, a snoring dog at my feet.  My street has a sound of whooping kids and chatting neighbours like the street I lived my first eleven years on, in Notre-Dame-de-Grace in Montreal, stacked with the Lambert duplexes which were built at the same time as these east end semi-detached two storey houses were.  Same trim, floors and doors, same narrow little rooms, same burnt wood and paper smell when the doors and windows have been opened on the first hot day.  Plus ca change....  I don't remember neighbours like me, single women with big pooches.  Everyone was in some stage of family evolution or devolution, breeding, raising, booting from the nest or baby-sitting grandchildren.  We had no backyards, so we played on the street, swang off pipe balustrades like gymnasts, called off hide and seek, and tag, bounced balls  against brick walls between the houses in narrow little driveways to the back alley that were paved, and roamed the in-between green between Vendome and Marlowe where a grove of weedy trees could hide forts that we built without Dads or adults of any kind.  Public play was on the street, private play was under the balconies and verandas, and in the back gravel alley that ran the length of the block.  At night on my way home from a hard day's play, I could hear the neighbours at their kitchen tables eating their dinner, the noise of plates and pots, small conversation, scrapping and washing up.  I'm comfortable with this moderate cheek to jowl existence, hearing my neighbours, seeing parents run after their kids, Edgar's friends partaking of the yellow fire hydrant on our front lawn, cocktail hour two houses down.  For the most part I'd rather be sitting on the front stoop or porch, than insulated behind the high walls of my back yard.  On a long weekend, with my boy, knitting, drinking tall glasses of fuzzy water, exhaling.