Impressions of Paris, Ontario

It's strikingly pretty, the store fronts typical of any small Southwestern Ontario town, but the surrounding forested hillsides atypical. Nestled at the confluence of the Grand and Nith rivers, Paris is reputedly a good place to search for antiques. I've passed through many times en route to Simcoe, where my father's parents are buried and I spent a summer surveying Carolinian woodlands, but never had occasion to stop until yesterday afternoon. No money in my pockets to shop for anything except images.

After photographing the shops backing off Grand River Street (doorwindowwall), and the surface of the water (texture), I followed a middle-aged woman down a reclining sidestreet. It was a warm Monday afternoon, the wind promising rain. People had left front doors standing open.

The voice of an old man gave lessons to someone playing an out-of-tune piano. It was something that could have happened a century ago. Brick and clapboard houses with overflowing flower beds enhanced the mood, transporting me back. Through another screen tinkled the sound of a woman washing dishes by hand. In a garden behind the same house, a teenage girl in overalls sprawled reading on a bench among Rudbeckias and roses. Orange mountain-ash berries littered the sidewalk. The street wound upwards again, to a rusty steel footbridge spanning the Nith River. In a riverside park, two women faced one another across a picnic table. Downstream, in shade where large maples extended branches over the current, four adolescent boys sat talking.

Back toward downtown, a faded house backed onto the street. Beyond two windows in separate front rooms, an elderly couple sat at separate keyboards, computer light reflected in their glasses, drawing me back to the present. On a bench in front of a variety store, a man with unkept grey hair sat severely bent, eyes a few inches above his knees, peering as he painstakingly scratched a lottery card.