So-So

We didn’t know anyone in our neighbourhood, located just south of Southern Avenue, just west of Mill, when we moved in. When I told a friend who lives a mile north of here where we’d moved, she smirked, “Our neighbours call that So-So.”

I learned the ten blocks that make up “Tempe Gardens 2” by walking them, carrying, back then, our infant daughter and now, five years later, our infant son.

We’re in no particular hurry to become something more. It’s not naturally ambitious, but it won’t hold your dreams against you, and this means that you can make of it what you will.

Maybe that’s why you can still see homes in their original mid-century hues — pale lemonade yellow, weathered mint green, dusty baby blue — next to newer ones: the browns of the ’90s, the light greys of the most recently flipped houses.

Still, there is a trend: to sand off the rough edges, to sharpen the lines, to narrow the colours, to raise the prices. Still, like everything else, this rectangle in the Sonoran Desert is being born and becoming what it is and dying, just in no particular order.

All photos on Lomography 100 or 400 colour-negative film.