sometimes you can hear the water

I’ve been thinking about histories for the last little while. Landscape histories, architectural histories, geographical histories. I’d been having conversations over the past week or so that revolved around the physical past. And it was weird, these conversations just seemed to happen, with no prodding on my part, and it was only in retrospect that I noticed the common thread.

Sometime last week, I was sitting on the stoop in front of my apartment building late at night, when an elderly couple walked past. The gentleman had lived in my neighbourhood for fifty years, and he talked about how the street I lived on used to be a river when he first moved here.

“Some time, late at night,” he said. “Two three in the morning, when it’s quiet, you can hear the water.”

And after a bit of cane-waving, the gentleman and his wife shuffled off.

I could wax poetic about how in order to experience nature in a city we’d have to wait until the traffic died down, and then kneel down in the middle of the street, ear pressed to the asphalt, and hope that the sounds of rushing water weren’t coming from the sewers. But I’ll save that for another day.

Another conversation I had was with a friend of mine who had spent most of his life in farmland. He had grown up in a house that was built in the early twentieth century, and told me about a visit an older lady had made to his home. She’d grown up in the house, and had invited herself in to take a look around her childhood home. The elderly lady came back a while later, grandchildren in tow, with a photograph of the house as she had remembered it.

And then I bought a magazine called Dwell that examined modern residential architecture. I fell in love with a transformation of a shophouse in Singapore into an über-modern residence. I fell in love with the idea that you would never have guessed that behind an ancient and almost decaying façade was a restored/redesigned/refashioned interior. That has got to be my favourite residential transformation to date.

I live in a city where copycat housing is everywhere – entire neighbourhoods look disarmingly identical. To me, that’s purgatory. If I had to live in a neighbourhood that looked like that, lunch would include antidepressants. It would drive me out of my mind. I can feel myself slowly going crazy (crazy going slowly) at the mental image of myself trapped in the middle of a block where the only thing that would set my house apart would be the shape of the doorknocker.