The Haunted (Place)

The winds were up sending their chorus through the back hedges and surrounding trees on the back park where the Terrace Pool had once been. The florescent orange yellow Day Lillies nodded two and fro in agreement upon a wind change in Chateauguay. 

Out front of the modest Bay bungalow, sideways to the road, the pulse thumping blaster in a car passed on down Ashmore from Saint Francis to the Chateauguay River and Salaberry Street. Ashmore,-where once names like Black, Brown or Michielsson had been, now a throughway to the river.  If one stopped deadstill, one could feel the history of the place, alive and between the time shadows. Upon the breeze one might capture the echoes of girl's squeals -laughter, young men grunting touch football, or one might sense activities to be had if heading toward the canoe club, the dam or to the tennis courts in the Heights. 

If one closed the eyes, the ghosts would appear, images and the songs- you know the ones. And above all, the secret yearning of youth to fly, far far away from this nowhere place, of slow pace endless hot summer. One would feel the yearning for more than the Alamo, the rail bridge, the high-school. One could feel the want to be free from under parental guardianship, gone already to one's life and adventure.

This place is a space of 'the haunted' with names 'neath the memory's surface- Mumford, Oliver, Heatherington, Peters, Bossart, Hart, Behrens, Davis, Saunders, Jackson, Poirier, McManus, Houston, Kavenagh, Glen, Hillock, and Reid. So many names, so many children passing on to the generations. Yet Chateauguay remaines in the stillness of time. The High School - would always be 'Chateauguay High', despite the re-naming, to HS Billings. 

The sun painted varying hues of green upon the overgrown vines smothering the hedge between the Meanies and McConnells. A huge recycling truck could be heard roaring it's way along Newton from Maple, past Treavor Crawford's to Ashmore. The rumble of Jurgen Kalashnik's Triumph coughed to sudden life across the street, as Joanne (O'Hanley)gazed on; this evoking more memories - Bob St.Onge, Lilly, the Sundowners, 'The Beach', West-End Bowlarama and past heroic legends and tragedy.  

Ashmore and Parc-Ricard had been ideal for bringing up children. But in his heart he knew that a 'time' here was once again slowly setting.

Like all the rest from High School he too  had struggled in the hot summer quagmire of lethergic Chateauguay, - perhaps hanging out at the shopping center, the pines, the orchard, the Raja  Mood, Seigneury Park, desperately seeking girlfriends, for a whiff of summer wind in their hair and maybe venturing with her down the path in the woods to the old farm house where the water still ran through an upright pipe where the pump had once been. 

A patchwork of old memories surged. 
The night times, ah yes- the night times... 'doing things we used to do- thinking of you, I sit and watch as tears go by'... The Beatles, the Stones, CFOX radio, Dean Hagoppian, 'The girls walk by dressed up for each other, And the boys do the boogie-woogie on the corner of the  street, And the people passin by just stare in wonder and the inside juke-box roars out like thunder. And everything looks so complete... The Wild Night is Calling! 
(Van Morrison)