This street was full of families with young children when we moved into our house twenty years ago. There was a sprinkling of retired people, and we were not yet at that point ourselves retired. Our children, however, had long flown the nest and lived their own, independent lives.

We observed the children living on the street in their infancy, growing into primary-school-age, secondary and university. Some have since graduated, left home to strike out on their own, living in places as far off as Australia, Hong Kong, the United States, and the far reaches of Canada. Others have reached the point where they're new university students, embarking on the education that would lead them to their chosen fields of employment.

Hard to believe the fresh-faced youngsters we watched play in their driveways, toddle along with their parents, or being pushed along in strollers, are now so fully-grown and emotionally developed. True there is the odd one out who left before fully accomplishing a high school diploma and whom everyone knows deals drugs from his home, but he is the exception. In his favour he is a pleasant, very well-met young man. One trusts he merely dabbles and has not adapted his values to hard drugs.

It's always amazing to see the physical development of these children when the vision of their childhood remains fresh in our minds. Sometimes, it seems, equal to that of our own children and beyond, though the time distant between them is doubled in length. And then, too, there is now a higher proportion of retired people living on this street, although some original residents have left the neighbourhood. And in their place another kind of renewal as young families with very young children have moved in.

Time and the ordinary tides of the human yardstick....