We commissioned local writer Ariel Kroon to imagine a day in the life of Waterloo Region’s millionth neighbour, based on the priorities identified in our roundtable discussions with non-profits and community groups. Giving life and personality to our vision document, this short story gives us a peek at one possible future for Waterloo Region, where neighbours live with abundance, inclusion, and resilience.

Do you have a story to share? Imagining the future we want to see is the first step toward achieving it. We’re looking for more stories on the theme of “a day in the life”: what would the ideal future for Waterloo Region look like to you? Submit yours by filling out this form.

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Growing Up, Branching Out

by Ariel Kroon

Sapphira was not in a good mood, even though today was a Community Day, and she and her friends had been talking about going to the music festival for weeks. That morning, the seventeen-year-old woke up feeling cranky, and her attitude was not improved by the fact that her dad was in the kitchen that morning making a special pancake breakfast, which was great and everything, but his way of cheering Sapphira up was to make her laugh. This was super annoying as it always worked, even when she was trying her best to wallow in her feels. She scowled at her pancakes, trying not to let him see that his goofy dancing in the kitchen was causing the side of her mouth to twitch into a half-smile. She sat down and grabbed at the maple syrup; it was a new kind she hadn’t tried before, from a local farm that they had gotten butter and eggs from for years, but which recently had teamed up with another farm to tap their maples.

“So, where’s Mom?” Sapphira asked loudly, hoping her father would know by her tone that she was in no mood to be light-hearted.

“In Toronto with her book club,” her dad, Ravi, was undeterred. He jigged over and slid two steaming pancakes onto a large pile. “Eat up! We’re festival-bound!” He waggled his brows at her and started an off-key rendition of “(Always) Love You” by Layla and the Nightingales on his way back to the kitchen.

“Cut it out,” Sapphira growled rudely. “Some of us are in mourning.”

Ravi, his cooking finished, came out of the kitchen and took a seat across the table. “And why would that be?”

“My plants for bio class.” Sapphira slumped dramatically in her chair.

“We’re in a drought, sweetie,” Ravi said reasonably, as if they hadn’t had this conversation about five times over the last week.

“Yeah but EVERYONE else’s plants are like twice the size of mine,” Sapphira groused. “THEY don’t seem to be having any issues.”

“Your bio teacher won’t mark you down because of the weather,” her father said mildly.

“Okay, fair…” Sapphira admitted reluctantly. “But you know I wanna study bioengineering at university, so it’s important.”

“Not as important as finishing your breakfast,” Ravi’s tone brooked no nonsense. “I’ve already eaten, and we need to be out the door in forty minutes if we want to make it to the park in time to hear Layla and the Nightingales.”

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It was a 20-minute bike ride from their house in a suburb of Waterloo to Three Willows Park, mostly via trails that kept the family away from the buses and trams. Sapphira, having texted her friends, was going to meet up with them at the bike shelter near the entrance to the park, and they made it there with enough time for her to lock up her bike and commence loitering. Her dad almost immediately spotted a group of his Grand River fishing buddies and disappeared.

Sapphira was investigating the new public art piece—which was some sort of sculpture; she refused to read the artist’s statement because that would be cheating—when she was poked in the shoulder and a familiar voice asked her, “Hey, what’s up?”

“Not much,” Sapphira turned to see her friend Bilal, grinning at her. “Check out this new sculpture thing.”

“Yeah, it’s super cool. I saw it last week after soccer practice,” Bilal was from Guelph, but played in the intramural soccer league here in K-W. “Seen BT yet?”

“Nope,” Sapphira checked her phone. “I think we’ve got a bit before Layla starts though.”

BT was coming from Cambridge; they had all met and become fast friends while working at an art camp that summer.

It wasn’t long before BT arrived on the LRT, though, and Sapphira took the opportunity to loudly mourn her poor stunted plants and her bio grade as they made their way towards the bandstand.

“We’re in a drought,” BT said bluntly. “Like, we’re not even allowed to have open flame at neighbourhood cookouts, it’s that bad.”

“Same thing in Guelph,” Bilal chimed in. “But Sapphie, can we swing by your school garden after Layla’s set? I wanna see these plants myself.”

“Can you help?” Sapphira asked eagerly, ready for Bilal to reveal himself as a secret treasure trove of gardening knowledge.

“Um, I’m not making any promises,” Bilal perhaps heard the slight edge of desperation in Sapphira’s voice. BT snorted.

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Sapphira had no intention of sitting with the adults; Dad and his buddies were great people, but she wasn’t psyched about hanging out with adults lately, and besides, they needed to find a good vantage point for BT. Luckily, there was space reserved near the front for those with mobility issues and their family/friends so that they could see, and the friends all settled in, chatting amiably about what they’d been up to for the past week. Because transit across the region was so frequent, they had no trouble hanging out with each other whenever they wished, and in fact had seen each other just that past weekend, as they all helped out at the same elders’ residence just outside of Guelph. 

Layla and the Nightingales were fantastic. Sapphira felt slightly guilty for slipping away afterwards, but only slightly; there was a huge crowd of listeners and besides, she was only going away for about an hour. She texted her dad to that effect, then headed to her bike.

The arts-focused secondary school that Sapphira attended was a mere five minutes’ ride from her house, housed in a repurposed office tower; flex-work policies coupled with reduced office hours had made a lot of corporate real estate redundant a few decades back, and the school board had seen the opportunity, bought up properties for cheap, and given them new life. Sapphira fixed her bike to the school’s rack just as the electric bus let BT and Bilal off and they went down to the grade 12 bio class’s garden plot. The mulched pathway winding around the bioswales was a little challenging for BT’s wheels to navigate, and Sapphira noticed Bilal helping out with a gentle push whenever BT indicated. Nice.

They came on neat rows of what looked to be … well, seedlings. They weren’t recognizable yet as the “three sisters” vegetables—squash, pole beans, and corn—that they would grow to become. They were all roughly of a height and were already sending out a second set of leaves… all except for a patch in the corner near the fence, marked “Sapphira Radley-Singh.” These seedlings were about half the size of the others, with only their first set of leaves.

“You planted these at the exact same time as all the others?” Bilal asked, squatting down to inspect the seedlings more closely.

“Yes.” Sapphira sulked.

“And you used the same seeds and soil as the rest of the class?”

“Mm-hmm.” She nodded. They had been learning all about the conditions that were perfect for growing heirloom varieties, and she was confident she’d planted the seeds in the right conditions with the right nutrients for their success.

“Then that’s super weird,” Bilal declared, rocking on their heels to stand back up.

BT was frowning into the distance, no doubt working something out. Bilal peppered Sapphira with questions—what varietals were they, was she watering them regularly, what soil amendments had she used. She answered them all—she was doing everything exactly the same as her classmates, down to using the same rain barrel water and compost tea from the bins at the back of the school where they composted lunch scraps.

“Wish I had a soil test kit,” Bilal said eventually. “Like, maybe someone’s sabotaging you and putting salt in it when nobody’s looking.”

“Oh crap,” Sapphira was dismayed. “I didn’t even think of deliberate sabotage.”

“Got any mean girls out for you?” BT asked, chin in hand. “Got anyone jealous in the class?”

Sapphira truly could not think of anyone. However, they needed to make the trek back to Three Willows as the hour was nearly up, and Sapphira opted to wait the twelve minutes for the next bus with Bilal and BT.

Discussion of the mystery of the seedlings turned eventually to chatter about the upcoming election—Sapphira and BT could vote; Bilal had an unfortunate birthday—when BT suddenly pointed at the corner of the garden with Sapphira’s plants. “Look!”

A tomcat was leisurely marking his territory along the schoolyard perimeter. And when he came to the fence pole closest to Sapphira’s seedlings, well… her plants were most definitely in the “splash zone.” With a chorus of exclamations, the trio each raised their phones to capture the evidence, just moments before Sapphira broke and ran towards the cat, shrieking and waving her arms to scare it off.

Eventually, the cat—a stray, it turns out—was trapped by local volunteers and adopted into a new home in Kitchener. Sapphira’s plants began to thrive without their regular ammonia bath, and she ended up getting a very good grade in bio that semester. But at the end-of-school celebration, she did not eat the three sisters’ soup.