The first year and new family

The building where my classes were held was on the old hospital grounds, in one of the buildings that the administration had decided it no longer needed when it built it's new facilities fifteen years ago. It was a part of the mental health department, somewhat appropriate I suppose.

One of my favourite things about this location was all the plant life; having come from the country the biggest shock for me was the lack of nature. That isn't to say that there was no plants around me. Normally, even in the heart of the city there were trees and shrubs, but you need to understand that plants are not the same thing as nature. I found myself living in suburbia, where people try to convince themselves that they aren't in the city by covering their properties in evergreen trees and garish blooms, carefully tended lawns, cultivated trees and bushes or sharp edged hedges. How a place so rife with greenery can be so unnatural is one of the great achievements of civilization.

To reach my classes I had to travel past the main hospital building, making my way up the driveway and down into the deeper regions of the grounds.
The left side of the path was lined with small pines and some squat, wide-spreading tree whose name escapes me. Behind them was the backdrop of undulating hills, crisscrossed with power lines and topped with some kind of pylon in the distance, like a gigantic Christmas angel perched atop a bare and dried out tree.
The right side of the path dropped away down into a small gully, or large ditch. I can only assume it had once been filled with nature, but the life had been gouged out of it at some point before I arrived on that first day. Now it was an old wound, scabbed over with dried tree stumps, weeds and a profusion of faded grasses. The view beyond this scar looked out over a drab grey postcard of suburbia, with houses tiered along the hillside. On the numerous occasions when I found myself headed homeward after dark the view was immeasurably better; the scar was filled with shadows and the houses had simply become a handful of stardust thrown across the distant hills.

Thankfully my journey to class took me beyond this lifeless scenery, over a slight rise, then across a bridge and down the bank to where our second home was waiting to welcome us each morning. Maybe at some stage in the past this area had been just as lifeless and pained as around the hospital, but through happy providence by the time I arrived this was no longer the case. Years of no one giving a crap had lent the inner areas of the hospital grounds a feeling of nature and chaos; one that the more cared for areas did not have the benefit of.
The trees along the stream leaned at strange and sometimes precarious angles, twisting their arms around each other for support. The pavement was growing cracks and grasses just as fast as gutters grew moss, and the lawns were only occasionally mowed. The driveway to the front of our building was flanked by tall trees. Small leaves twisted down from their branches and floated across the parking lot, gathering together in the corners to whisper with each other about the shed bark that hung lazily from the side of the tree trunks.
The rear of our strange house was no exception; tall thin plants grew up the side of the steps where we came in each morning, defiant of the cigarette butts that littered the area, an area where many of my new siblings spent their stolen moments between classes puffing and exhaling.

Beyond and behind us, there was a large field. When I first arrived it was wild with tall rustling grass. Unfortunately during that first term manual laborers were shipped in to hack and burn it into something useful. It ended up resembling a flatter version of the scar, but since the field could be seen from the hospital windows, possibly that was their intention all along. Soon after they replaced the workers with horses, who would come to the fence and idly watch us when we played rugby.