In my heart is a patina
“I am sad we are growing up” I wrote to my sister today. “Hahah yeah. True” she wrote back.
At 12PM yesterday the trams at Newhaven opened. For those of you in Edinburgh, you’ll be sick of the discourse no doubt. For those of you not in Edinburgh, about a decade ago the city council here decided to build trams from the airport to the sea port at Newhaven. The original project only made it as far as the city centre.
For the past few years, they’ve finally been completing the project. People like me, who live in Leith or Newhaven, have had all manner of traffic and construction causing chaos. But now: they’re open!
It’s bizarre to live through the construction of something like that. I often think of it as one of those things where if you left and come back, it would tell you immediately that things aren’t the same anymore. Now, there’s a tram!
For the first four years I lived in Edinburgh the city was building the St James Quarter, previously the St James Centre. Another one of those things where if you leave and come back, things are the same but different. It took four years to build, and I thought the construction of it would outlive me here in Scotland. I regretted not properly celebrating it when it finally opened.
So, when the trams project was in the works, I decided that the day it opened I would celebrate by getting the tram all the way from Newhaven to Edinburgh Park Central (almost the airport). There’s a lovely cafe that everyone raves about there called Patina. Yesterday, that’s exactly what I did.
The tram was fun, the cafe was fine, probably not worth a forty five minute tram ride, but hey ho I was celebrating. What really got me is the timeliness of all of it —
Just the other day I was dusting and I noticed a lamp in our hallway is developing it’s own patina. I bought the lamp from a thrift store in Edinburgh for my very first room in my flatshare here four years ago. It’s gold, and curvy, and vintage looking, and my mom describes it as bodacious. Yet in all the years of its life, it didn’t develop a patina until it fell into my clutches.
That’s how life feels for me right now, like the instant I get my hands on anything it starts getting old in double time.
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