Out With The Old.

When I was a little girl back in Nova Scotia, one of our big family routines was shopping. It was our family event, the thing we did together the most. We’d pile in to the car and drive the 20 minutes in to “town” to go to the mall. As far as malls go, it wasn’t a big one. A grocery store, a drugstore, a Reitmans, a restaurant. Record store, shoe store, gift store. A standard small town mall. And at one end was Zellers.


At night I still have dreams about that mall, about that store. It was such a part of my youth that it’s actually burned in to my brain. I still distinctly remember walking up to the entrance and going through the big double doors. Straight ahead and a little to the left was the Womens and Girls clothing section, where I’d scour for hours to find clothes and try them on in the cramped, rickety changing rooms with pins on the floor. If you walked down the aisle to the back corner, you reached the toy section where I would inspect the Barbies and determine which one was the best value for money. In the other corner near the mall entrance there was a restaurant, I think it was called the Skillet, even though I never knew what that word meant. I still remember sliding in to the wooden booths and eating the hottest, crispiest french fries and golden triangles of fish, served by women who called me Dear. Next to the skillet was the pet section where I bought my first – and many subsequent replacement – guppies and neons and goldfish.

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