It almost seems as if they were never here in the first place. The park is empty except for the people cutting through the grounds on its concrete paths.
Birds fly overhead as squirrels scamper up tree trunks and rummage through wood-chipped gardens.
Christmas lights remain wrapped around tree trunks and their limbs. The winter sun peers through naked tree branches and shines brightly on a park that nearly 500 people called home for 40 days last fall.
The muddy lawn has been replaced with a beautiful new field of grass. The shadows have grown longer.
People shuffle through the park as if Occupy Toronto never existed.
As if the logistics tent that provided sleeping bags, tents and other survival supplies never existed.
As if the medical tent, staffed by health-care professionals who tended to the physical and emotional needs of occupiers, never existed.
As if the food tent that prepared and served over 1,000 meals a day never existed.
As if the library and free school that nourished their minds never existed.
As if the 100 homeless men and women who lived at St. James Park magically found housing since the end of the occupation.
As if the 500 people who dreamed of a better world never existed.
The park benches where people sat down and contemplated a vision to achieve a more equitable and sustainable world are now empty.
The voices that echoed through the air near the gazebo at noon each day have given way to the quiet rustling of poplar leaves. Christmas lights adorn the railing and the frame of the abandoned gazebo.
On the concrete floor, now littered with glossy magazines, subway newspapers and an empty cigarette carton, is a message scrolled in blue paint: Occupy Again.
They were here. The city can’t erase that.
And it can’t stop a movement that will prosper even without an occupation.
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