I could sum up Roncy in more or less the same words I used in March 2008.   But not with the same feelings.  The details are similar, but the meaning and shades and tones have changed….

There is a qualitative difference in how I feel about my community, which arises from the length of time I’ve been here: 18 years.   In the  decades of my life, I have never lived anywhere longer than 7 years, so I’ve discovered that the countless relationships we form in such a neighbourhood metamorphose into something different in nature than they are at five or 10 years.  It’s as if the length of the experience makes us more accepting of flaws, quirks and foibles that we might once have reacted to.  We see them in a more relative way.  Now they are simply familiar patterns in the social development of ‘neighbourhoodness’ 🙂  The time itself adds yet another dimension to it all — and well worth sticking around to learn.   To think that if I had kept on moving, I would never have known this…