But I’d been unfair to Scarborough. I’d let myself forget that this city operates with its own surly logic, distinct from the hustle of downtown Toronto or the exhibitionism of Montreal. Not that it doesn’t have either of those things — not, by any means, that Scarborough doesn’t hustle, doesn’t preen.

Scarborough is its own city, unconcerned with what other cities are doing and liable to tell you off very loudly if you suggest it should care. Where I live, the bus routes are uncooperative. The malls are big boxes, and the streets quickly succumb into highways, lined with open fields where massive insect-like electric poles stand in for trees. The music in the cars is a lot louder, the drivers a little more aggressive. The people arrange themselves into groups, loyalties worn deliberately on their sleeves, separating like oil and water, brown from black from white, class from class, we are who are legal and those who aren’t.

I took a different turn today, walked down some blocks I generally only drive through. Suddenly, there are patches of green sprouting unrepentantly between the model minority backyards. The thick road streaks over an unremarkable concrete bridge that hangs flat over a ravine that descends into a thin, clear brook. There is a small graveyard on the way to the grocery store, a corner lot that bumps against the six-lane road, large enough to contain maybe 60 people, tombstones tottering into the lawn without a house. And there is a tract of land on the way to the bank that someone forgot to turn into a townhouse, a neat rectangle of untended grass with a lone twisted goalpost. The clouds collect here, in this small space, the way they do not elsewhere, and fall over themselves into the grass.