Where I Work

Southfield was named for the part of the GIANT farm it was part of back when Dutchmen and the British were not speaking to each other. And then divided by subsequent heirs until the big bad state decided to grab it.

Victoria Rd which is Southfield’s main road is a feeder road to the two main highways.
On its path, you get to see purveyors of tools, bunny chow, a dilapidated old shell of what
was once a low rate hotel, a curved grave yard and the more posh looking houses until you go over the two gatekeeper bridges.
And between these two bridges and slightly over it, is Southfield.
Where Urban decay, meets bourgeois middle class lawns and maladies  from the “coloured” township run between these extremes.
But lets not forget our local refugees and displaced persons who have taken residence with an amiable “hello neighbor” attitude that everyone seems to translate as an impending sign of the Apocalypse.

It’s a peculiar place, mostly because everyone who lives here finds it so....peculiar, and often have surreal moments of wondering how they ended up here in the first place, like they’ve woken from a waking dream only to fall asleep and move on.
(Its why a lot of people from mental institutions end up here.)

The library is a study of contrasts, it literally takes up an entire corner, it is huge but the actual library space, with all the books, is quite small.
It was a converted from a hall into a library after it became a tad bit expensive to maintain a hall barely used. Which is what happened to Southfield Post office. Its now a corner café.
When I started here, the building had been newly converted from hall to library. Freshly built shelves shared space with dark ancient wood warped by heavy books and furniture polish.
I reckon the best types of memories are the ones that come in smell-o-vision. To this day the right combination of furniture polish, wood varnish and plaster still takes me back to that first day.

Since that first day nothing’s changed in Southfield.
Its still as quietly woolly as it ever was.