The Greenfield Park Gazette

Here’s some reminiscing of that huge, perhaps toxic, pile of snow that used to be dumped on St. Charles, written by John Goodman. He speaks eloquently of times when we had more green spaces than condos. My own memory of a great local green space was the forest on Campbell (now occupied by a church) - boy, what a spot for a lad on a bike! What was your long gone green space?

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It seems that creating something where there once was nothing is a goal that most people (I hope) strive to attain. The history of histories shows countless examples of countless peoples building monuments to testify to the world, “We were here”. What is - is what’s usually documented rather than what isn’t, but sometimes the intangible of what’s not there leaves more of a concrete impression.

Such is the case with the fairly new condo development adjacent to the park. There was a time when no building existed on that land; a time when snow from all around was dumped there, and there it remained until the spring. Until the great melt that land of snow was well used by younger people from around the park as a base of operations for wars of balled snow. Forts were dug, granola bars were sealed away in crevices under tons of snow just waiting to be used as bodily fuel in the heat of battle, and the friendly war between the French and English kids raged on.

As each spring returned and the snow began to melt the structures that housed the war-weary disappeared. A friend recently pointed out that each spring turned summer revealed a harsher and less fertile land almost certainly attributed to the salt in the snow. This progression to barrenness, it seems, was a metaphor for the forthcoming doom of that empty space.

Gone are the days of snow fights perched atop a story or two of the remnants of who knows how many blizzards. What now remains is the wait until I walk by that terrain with my own children and explaining to them in my best old-timer way that, “When I was a kid that ground had no homes”.

This is not to say that progression and development are bad or unwanted, but in these days of post-Christmas winter, so far from the warm kisses of spring sun, I find myself revisiting a time when stepping on a soft spot on a manmade mountain and sinking to my waist while being pummeled with snow, and the occasional ice ball, by the young francophone population was the worry of the day. I wonder if the next generation will have empty spaces to tell their children about. Hopefully the words, “When I was your age I played baseball where that A&P is” will never be spoken.

- John Goodman