The Cherry Park area has a monthly newsletter and Lee-Anne volunteered to help deliver its December edition. The section she was designated responsibility for was Strange Street. I love that name, it's such a strange choice for a street.
I think I've mentioned some of the unusual addresses in Kitchener at some point on this blog. There's a Home Street, and I love the idea of living at 123 Home St, because it sounds like the most fake address ever.
We've got a Princess Street, which makes sense considering we have other royalty names, like King, Queen, Duke, and Earl. But Princess still feels unexpected.
There's a very short Griffin Ave. While it's not spelled like my name, I think it would be funny for me to live there.
We've got a Kitchener Street in Waterloo and a Waterloo Street in Kitchener... and a Waterloo street in Waterloo, which connects to it's counterpart and repeats some of the numbers. Madness.
I decided to tag along and help Lee-Anne deliver the newsletters. Let me tell you, Strange Street lived up to its namesake.
The first bunch of houses didn't have any mailboxes, which made delivering awkward. The first place was a two story structure with five residential units. It wasn't larger than a house but it was built like an apartment building. A lot of places with tightly packed living spaces give themselves weirdly fancy names that don't have anything to do with the location.
I grew up in a building called "The Pinedales", which neighboured "The Sprucedales". There was a sign outside the townhouse complex I used to live in that said "Brookside Park". This two story, five residence house with no mailboxes that was trying to look like an apartment building had a name! The lowest population I've ever seen to believe they warrent their own.
One of the addresses was 17 1/2. That instantly reminded me of Platform 9 3/4 from Harry Potter. A place that only exists for users of magic. I wondered if we were delivering to a Wizard's residence, and was baffled that the address actually existed and was displayed as such.
There was a factory with a bunch of false entrances. Staircases leading up to brick walls. Having a large factory in the middle of a mostly residential area is slightly strange on its own.
There was a church rectory that had a mailbox at the level of a cat door. There might be a religious reason for this that I am unaware of, but without context that seemed strange to me. Also, do cat doors actually exist? I feel like everyone knows what they are, but I've never seen one in real life. Kitchener has a bylaw against outdoor cats, so maybe it's illegal to contruct them here.
There was a flower store that had the same address as a house that was earlier on the street.
We found this sign
I think it says "The Taifty Secret Closet is open". I don't understand any of what that means. Pretty strange!
One of the houses had a banner saying that they support frontline workers. This sounds like a reference to the pandemic, when many jobs were changed to be remote. Those that couldn't were placed at a higher level of risk. Since the Global Health Emergency has been called off, front line workers are just employees again. I could believe that someone just forgot to take it off, or felt awkward about removing it. But the banner was in chalk, so it must have been re-drawn at least somewhat recently to be so clear.
One location had a dog on a really long leash standing in front of the side door with the mailbox. The owner yelled from a window for it to be quiet. We yelled back that we were delivering a newsletter and he said we could put it on the front porch since the dog couldn't reach there. We hadn't considered that since the porch was covered in boxes, making it inaccessible.
My brain tells me that the name the guy called the dog was "Ember", but what I actually heard was "Member". I realized I was trying to rewrite what I perceived because the former is more normal, but it was probably the latter because it would be more... strange.
We saw this mailbox setup
Why not display them consecutively? Pretty strange!
We ran across this decorated mailbox
Honestly, more cute than strange.
I got this scenic pic of some railway tracks while I was on the walk
It was also a blizzard outside, which is suitably strange considering the weather trends in recent history. This was later as we delivered the newsletter
Ankle deep, how strange!
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