When I was a young girl,  and had finished elementary school, I had to go to a school closer to downtown to attend junior high. I used to love walking home from there, past a traditional neighbourhood like this one with its huge, well-established trees.

It was different from my own neighbourhood where newcomers had built their  homes on the outskirts of town, without even a proper street in place yet. Our house was reached by following tire tracks in a grassy field. Much later the roads were built, and eventually the town even put in ditching to redirect spring meltwater that had been running over the road and into everyone’s basement each year.

But closer to downtown, the homes had been there long enough for large trees to grow and add a stately touch to the neighbourhood. Sidewalks were a luxury. We had none yet. I felt as if I were walking through one of the stories in my grade three reader, where people lived in perfect suburbs – the kind every middle class family could be proud of in the 1960s.

The yards were untidy enough to be something close to natural, but not wild and messy with garbage. Safe enough for a person to go for a run without fear of being mugged.

Back then, people were not afraid of being hit on the head or stabbed or shot when they went into town to do their shopping. The worst thing that happened was that someone went up our street at three in the morning stealing the milk money from the empty bottles everyone put out for the milkman each day.

Most townspeople had never heard of home invasions. Many of the houses didn’t even have a lock on their door. We didn’t.

Can you even imagine that?!

Back then, I would have loved to live in a neighbourhood like the one in the photo above.

Of course we have more modern houses now with all the special gadgets and electronics to run our appliances and Internet to put us in touch with the whole rest of the world, but I wonder if I wouldn’t be tempted to give it all up to have the laidback lifestyle of those days back again.

How about you? Are there aspects of those more gentle days that you wish we had been able to keep?