An oasis amid the city

The sad part about losing sight of the past is that it curtails the imagination. You think the present is normal, and since it’s tolerable, it’s acceptable. But without a vision of the past, there’s no springboard to imagine the sublime.I was forcibly struck by this last week when, by chance, I wandered into Todmorden Mills on the east side of the Don River, where Pottery Road connects Broadview and Bayview Avenues.In all the years I lived in Toronto, I had never been there, and I’ve only known the Don as a dirty strip of water with the usual collection of trees that you might find on any abandoned construction site — Manitoba maples, crack willows, and black alders, to name a few invasive species.