Fresh Start

Last year I decided I wanted to live in Sidney. A lot of change was happening at the time – I had also decided to retire and moving from Esquimalt was becoming imperative (but that’s another post). I wanted to start my new life in a new home in a new community where my old routine had never been and therefore establishing a new one would be easier. I envisioned a slower pace, taking long walks along the water, hanging out at a café with a chai and my book or journal or card tag, baking cookies, rebooting my library card … Basically letting life happen at my speed rather than struggling to keep up with it.

Sidney seemed a perfect choice. It was different without being unfamiliar, close enough to town without being in town and far enough from town to be somewhere else. The “somewhere else” is key.

Turns out I actually wanted to escape. I wanted to put distance between me and my past life, which was a good life but a demanding one. I was buckling under the stress of carrying on with limited Ru time – my self-care practices were aimed solely at surviving and, as Star Trek TNG noted, “survival is insufficient.” Retiring from the public service was one thing, but I also felt the pressure of staying in touch when I really wanted to go dark.

And Ter and I absolutely had to get out of our living situation. She was at her wits’ end coping with the troll above us and I was losing my mind trying to compensate. But that’s another post. Maybe.

Decision made, we proceeded to scout possibilities in Sidney. Weekend road trips were inconclusive. If we were looking for a definitive yea or nay from the Universe, it wasn’t coming. Vacancies were scarce and the rents as ridiculous as they are in town. We had a few pleasant visits – it’s a tourist town and folks are friendlier than in Victoria, plus the bakeries are notoriously good – but as the summer wore on, it seemed less and less plausible that we’d find a place to call home.

Then, waking up one Friday morning, in the 17 seconds of neutral space before my mind kicked in, I distinctly heard the words “Oak Bay.” Oak Bay? Yeah, right. Oak Bay is the one part of town we couldn’t afford and therefore hadn’t considered when discussing possibilities. Yes, we love the area. It was a favourite haunt when we were at Rockland and in Fairfield, but it’s Oak-frigging-Bay. Land of the whining rich, the privileged few, the upper tax bracket. It wasn’t, well, possible.

But the Universe knows better than I do, and I know enough to pay attention when I think I hear something. I also know to bounce these things off Ter before I dismiss them. So I mentioned this to her, whereupon she confessed she was okay with Sidney but would really rather stay in town. In fact, she’d become more nostalgic about the area since we – I – had decided to leave it. That was my second hint.

The following Monday I started looking and immediately saw a listing for a 2-bedroom flat in Oak Bay that we could actually afford. It was an older building, circa 1969, and we’ve always shied from cookie-cutter situations, but I told Ter about it anyway, figuring she’d dismiss it sight unseen.

She didn’t. In fact, her little voice warned against dismissing it. Long story short, after a series of minor miracles that propelled us forward, we arranged a viewing, went to see it and signed a lease the next week. We moved in on June 12, six months to the day from my last day at work in December, and while it doesn’t really look like what we envisioned, it certainly feels like it. There is no doubt it’s where we are meant to be. In fact, it recently occurred to me that it is exactly what I asked for: north and east facing, lots of light, right on the main drag, walking distance to everything … pretty much what I imagined in Sidney, only not in Sidney.

It's home.

Gardening

 

When Ter and I lived on Rockland Avenue, our little deck between the gables was bright with baskets of fuchsias, pots of pansies, and assorted other vessels containing greenery of some ilk. One year, pepper, tomato and strawberry plants jostled for position with the petunias, azaleas and marigolds. The yield wasn’t great, though what fruit we did get was delicious beyond description, and my lasting memory is of fighting to remove the strawberry plant at the end of its season. The thing had sent runners beneath the planks of the deck and what looked like errant strands of twine actually possessed greater strength than a pair of human hands; alas, we resorted to shears when pride was on the line.

I say “we.” I mean “Ter.” Gardening is a spectator sport for me, but she helped her dad grow veggies in the back forty when she was a little girl. And she enjoyed it! So the Rockland rooftop garden was her doing. As has been my habit from the start of our relationship, I merely enjoyed the fruits of her labour.

Genetics can’t play that big a role in the colour of one’s thumb, however. My wee sister would have a garden to rival Buchart’s if she had the time and energy. She once told me that she enjoys planting random things just to see what pops up, and last spring she created a box garden to grow her own vegetables. I can’t imagine where that impulse comes from. As far as I know, none my other sibs are horticulturists, and the family front yard was rarely more than mowed. I think Mum might have done more, but she had her hands full with everything else domestic, and Dad was not at all interested.

It seems Ter and I have each followed our fathers’ examples. I can’t be bothered to water one indoor plant let alone a bunch of them, yet any time we’ve been house-hunting, she’s hoped for a balcony or a little corner in the yard where she can tend a few herbs and flowers.

I am happy to report that—ta da!—we now have a balcony! It’s not a big one, but Ter has kept it vibrant with a variety of plants that gets switched out as the seasons change. She’s out there every day, watering the tomatoes, trimming the mint, and deadheading the pansies. As one flower fades, she brings another home to replace it. She’s never happier than when she’s puttering with her ... I want to say “pot” garden, but in BC that means something entirely different.

Let’s go with “container.”

No Shoes, No Service?

Know what I like best about working from home? No shoes! Socks are optional depending on the weather, but they hardly count as restrictive footwear and besides, I had begun running around in sock feet at the office before COVID sent us into isolation.

It’s been a few weeks now and I’m getting into a groove. The bears are accustomed to me being here all day every day, so much that I wonder if I should make them all take the Oath of Employment, or at least of Confidentiality. Not that they (or I, for that matter) are privy to classified information, but what they sometimes hear could get me fired for being at odds with the party line. All government employees are at risk of biting the hand that feeds them at some point in their lives, and when you’re thirty years in ...

I digress.

Working from home is a notion I’d resisted for the longest time. I want to keep my worlds separate, and turning my bed/writing room into an office was a threat to that dividing line.

Turns out it’s not that bad. My office junk fits in a file box that gets hidden in the closet overnight and on weekends, and the government laptop, though hooked up to my personal rig’s keyboard, monitor and mouse during the week, is unplugged every Friday at quitting time and sits neatly atop my writing box, which is promptly restored to working order until Sunday evening. I have access to a kitchen shared with one person instead of seventy others – and that one person kindly does my lunch dishes in real time opposed to me doing them with the dinner dishes that evening. I take my morning tea with her instead of Treena, and have purloined a supply of loose Mumbai chai so I’m not missing my favourite despite missing the Blenz crew and my office buddies. I do communicate with folks on work matters, and visit the office once or twice a week to pick up supplies and go for a “real” Mumbai chai, often as a latte with extra foam, but overall ... working from home is working.

I do, however, insist on dressing as if for the office. Hair, bling, pretty tops and black jeans. It helps to hold that dividing line between the worlds, bare feet notwithstanding. Taking a walk after work also helps in shifting to “home” mode (I wear shoes then, or course). Do I want to WAH indefinitely, though? Not really. Part-time sure, but I am a social creature ... and some bears are getting too curious for their own good ...

View From Another Window

Ter and I no longer live in Fairfield. Our heritage suite was sold last fall and our new home is across the bridge in Esquimalt, which is still within the Capital Regional District but is far enough away from Victoria to be , as far as we’re concerned, on another planet.

Rather than being right across the street, the ocean is two blocks away. I can still see it through my bedroom window, but now it’s partially obscured by tall cedar trees and the rooftops between here and there. The mountains I admired from the Ocean Room are visible in the same frame—and yes, I have my own bedroom again. We both do, though Ter’s is known as “the nun’s cell” because it’s so much smaller than mine. She’s happy in her little den, as I am happy in what’s been dubbed “the Princess suite” because “master” cannot apply when one’s house elf was accidentally freed from service.

Fate has been extremely kind in granting us a suite where no one lives below us in a building where all our neighbours are older and (mostly) quieter than we are. We have more of them than we did off Dallas Road, but I’m the only soul in residence who leaves at crap o’clock because she has a regular job. Everyone else is retired or semi-so, but if you’re inclined to laugh at us being roomies in an old folks’ home, you can stifle the impulse right now. This place is a gift. It more than met all our conditions. It included a few we hadn’t even considered.

In truth, I have never felt as blessed by my loving friendly and generous Universe. Here, we can heal. We can rest and recharge from the ongoing strain of living above entitled millennials while adapting to a world, first, without Ter working and, second, without Mum. It’s been tougher than I thought it would be—not that I thought much about it until it happened, and if I had thought about it, I would never have imagined it playing out as it actually played out. Many things have changed. It seems everything has changed. One thing has not.

The view may be different, but the magic is the same.

Crap O’Clock

I am slumped in my comfy chair, still in my jammies with a hot Magic Bag softening my stiff neck and shoulders. A bleary-eyed Ter is nursing the day’s first cup of tea from her corner of the loveseat. Neither of us has the energy for small talk. A mournful wail suddenly wafts up from the lawn beneath our window, wending its way into our living room—it’s the three-year-old downstairs, voicing his displeasure at being dressed and out the door to daycare before seven a.m. on a weekday.

“Suck it up, junior,” I say, bluntly. “Life is hard so you’d better get used to it.”

Cut me some slack, okay? This is the same kid who wakes me from a sound sleep at this same ungodly hour on a Sunday by galloping gaily up and down the hall beneath our suite. Instead of sympathizing, I take a perverse pleasure in him being hauled out the door against his will two days a week when I have to get up and go to work for five. He thinks he’s hard done by now? Wait until he starts school, heh heh.

Yup, it’s a hard life all right. I am not nor ever have been a morning person. I have learned to appreciate the beauty of a sunrise over the ocean or the tranquil solitude of a pre-breakfast flânerie, but overall, I’d rather stay up late than get up early. And I can sympathize with Junior Jinx (as Ter calls him) to some degree: I became “anti-morning” when I started school myself. It’s not that I disliked school (much). I’m generally quite happy when I get to the office, too. It’s the getting up at crap o’clock to go somewhere I’d rather not go that well and truly bites.

I don’t know how my mother did it. She was always the first one up, summer or winter, rain or shine, and breakfast was usually on the hob before she knocked on my door with a cheery, “Wakey, wakey!” or—after my bones kicked in—an even brighter, “Pill time!” Those were bleak mornings for sure. I can’t imagine she liked them any better than I did, but I never saw it.

During a recent work tea with Treena, she reminisced fondly about the idyllic days of childhood. “Do you remember waking up every day, full of excitement and eager to see what adventure awaited?” she asked, wistfully.

I just stared at her, wondering what that must have been like. It seems every morning of my life is met with the question of whether I can do it. Whether I can get up and get going. It was particularly grim when I was younger, but I’ve hated being woken up forever. Sure, I can wake up happy on a weekend, but who doesn’t? It’s a weekend, for Pete’s sake!

Which reminds me: I have to reset the alarm before I go to bed tonight.

Crap.

Ghost Story (Preface)

I’ve heard it said that we don’t have history in Victoria. We have nostalgia. Whichever it is, we definitely have ghosts. I know because I lived with them at Rockland. For seventeen years, Ter and I shared our heritage suite with phantom freeloaders who probably considered us to be the interlopers until they got to know us. Okay, until they got to know Ter. She’s the more attuned of we two; I lived in blissful ignorance for almost a year before she confessed to encountering the red-haired kid the day after we moved into Number 16. Completely freaked out, I demanded to know why she’d said nothing at the time.

“Because I didn’t want to freak you out,” she replied.

I’m fairly sure my Freak-O-Meter would have hit the apex no matter when I was told, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because we’d signed a lease, but I was grateful that she had seen the little guy first. I didn’t see him until sometime later, when we got new neighbours and I spied him flitting into the kitchen from the corner of my eye. I’ll always remember the shock of that bright red hair.

There were other entities, too, though I never saw them. They felt more comfortable revealing themselves to Ter, who respectfully acknowledged their presence and went quietly on her way. As well as the red-haired kid, there was a young girl in the long dress and an older boy with dark hair. We called the three kids “Harry”, “Ron” and “Hermione” after the trio in the Harry Potter books. The house had served as a girls’ school, then a boys’ school, so we reckoned they must have been students. Some years in, we learned from a neighbour that the house had also been an old folks’ home. “That explains the old woman,” Ter remarked, at which my Freak-O-Meter spiked again.

“What old woman????”

“I don’t know who she is, but she’s pretty bitter,” was the nonchalant reply.

Yeah. Ghosts. Whether by history or nostalgia, Victoria has them.

A co-worker’s mother recently sold her house. It’s not a heritage house, but it’s the house my colleague has known for her entire life, so there was a legitimate fear that the new owners would tear it down for development since that’s what seems to be happening in this city of late. It bothers me for more reasons than the architechtural oddities popping up like mutant mushrooms throughout the neighbourhood; and while I sympathized with the potential loss of a colleague’s childhood home, I am most distressed by what happens to the ghosts.

Where do they go? What do they do? Are they tied to the structure or the land? I guess it depends on the ghost, but the conundrum sparked the writing exercise that is tomorrow’s post.

Enjoy.

Where the Heart Is

one of these things is not like the others ...

Most of the houses in my neighbourhood are near or over a hundred years old. I say “most” because a fair number of them have been torn down and replaced by what Boy Sister refers to as “chicken coop” houses – the West Coast style featuring flat roofs and no personality. They claim to reflect the environment in their slick wood façades and plate glass windows, but they actually stick out like the proverbial sore thumb among their elder neighbours. A recent trend has been to try and blend in with an arched roof and some fake Tudor accents around pseudo-mullioned windows, but really, it’s akin to setting out a plastic goblet with the Waterford.

I know the land is worth more than the structure sitting on it, but I’m beginning to resent the seemingly wanton destruction of older buildings to stuff bigger and less attractive domiciles onto property that once featured a lovely garden as well as a cute little cottage or a heritage home. I might view the influx more favourably if the new homes were multi-unit stratas or better yet, rental suites, but they’re not. Depending on the route I choose from the limo stop, I walk past at least three lots where older houses used to be, and none of the new constructs, though significantly larger than any of the original structures, appear built to accommodate more than one family and a basement suite to help the new owners make outrageous monthly mortgage payments. Worse, many single lots now feature a pair of too-big houses staring into each other’s windows, so there go the gardens for which Victoria was nicknamed.

I wonder sometimes where the ghosts go. Buildings house more than people, you know. They assume the energetic vibe of their occupants, and some of them retain that vibe long after the occupants have departed. Old buildings are particularly vibrant with the energy of their pasts. Ter and I were outnumbered by the phantoms in our suite at Rockland. That entire neighbourhood is rich with the presence of residents long past, drifting through the old mansions and manor houses that grace the tree-lined streets. It remains my favourite part of town, and I would happily return to it if I had the cash to snap up one of those crumbling old houses with their original woodwork and stained glass windows. If I had the cash, I’d buy one and restore it. I think it would thank me – and so would the ghosts.

Disheartened with the ubiquitous reconstruction of my current neighbourhood, I picked a rarely walked route home the other night. I thought that passing some less familiar houses would rejuvenate me after a particularly intense week at work. Surely, I thought, there is one street in Fairfield unblemished by new construction or a gaping hole where someone’s childhood home once stood.

A pair of teenaged boys were shooting hoops with a basketball halfway up the block. Cherry blossoms on the bubble of blooming beamed in the late afternoon sun. I noticed fresh paint on one of the houses, and new front stairs attached to another. Someone was mowing their lawn and the summery smell of cut grass blended with the salt breeze off the sea. I began to relax. My plan had worked. And then, I saw this:

*sigh*

There’s No Place Like Home

What does home feel like? For me, it’s a place where – or a person with whom – I am safe. Loved. Accepted for myself and free to be myself. Home is not a physical thing for me. It was when I was a kid, but even then, we moved around so much that getting attached to the house was futile. Home was where my family was – and I know I was luckier than a lot of kids. Ter, for instance, feels more at home with my kin than she did with her own, since growing up for her happened harder and faster than it did for me.

But that was when we were kids. As adults, we’ve made a home wherever we’ve lived, whether for six months or sixteen years. Sometimes, I haven’t wanted to go home. When renos were happening or the neighbours were too close beneath our feet, my office was preferable to my house, which speaks to the closeness of my colleagues as evidence that home is a feeling rather than a location.

Years ago, when I figured out how to operate the speed dial on my work phone, I loaded “home” onto the button just below “parents”. One day, meaning to call my folks, I instinctively dialled “home” (well done, Mum and Dad!) Two years ago, when Ter and I each got a cell phone, she took our old land line as her new number. I haven’t bothered to change the speed dial ID. Home means many things to many people, but for me, it means “Ter.”

Well done, bud. <3

You Can’t Go Home

we were here

Not when you rented the place, anyway.

Ter and I spent 17 years on the top floor of a grand old Victoria mansion, circa 1885. Two of those years were lived in #15, a two-storey loft with a gargantuan kitchen and a gorgeous view of the city skyline. The main problems with that suite were the paper-thin wall between us and #16, and the appallingly disrespectful tenant who took up residence there a year and a bit after we moved in. So after a bunch of the tenants got together and the girl was evicted, Ter and I moved next door to avoid a similar scenario down the road. (Being a two bedroom, #16 ran the risk of becoming home to another roommate situation unlike our own, where one was never home and the other was a party animal.)

Both suites were stunning for having been renovated to reflect the era in which the house was built. The walls were a soft sage green trimmed with plum, and the bare fir floors rippled gold and amber when the sunlight crept across them. We had ghosts in the hallways and tons of closet space, and a cute little rooftop deck between the gables. It was accessed by a little mullioned door on the far side of the vestibule, where we stashed our wine and root veggies in the winter (the vestibule got very cold!) Ter put pots of herbs and pansies on the deck, and often sat outside on a summer night, watching the stars until well past her bedtime. We stuffed both beds into the smaller bedroom and used the larger one—with the cathedral ceiling and identical view of the city skyline as #15—as our main living room. We used what was probably meant to be the living room as a quiet room, where we lined the built-in bookshelves with our hardcover coffee table books and plugged an electric heater disguised as a wood stove into the faux fireplace.

At Christmas, we draped greens over the doorways and put up a tree in every room. Pillar candles were stood in corners and glass bowls of potpourri scented the whole apartment with pine and cinnamon and orange.

The Julian and Therése story was written there in 1998. Lucius was born there in 2002. The Cassandra series was started and countless other projects completed. Ter did some artwork, but discovered a passion for cooking in the little kitchen that had only two electrical outlets plus the one in the stove.

We held countless afternoon teas. We walked up the road to Government House and Craigdarroch Castle, and down the road to town. The resident ghosts ranged from a mischievous schoolboy with red hair to a young girl in a flowing gown to an old lady with a bitter attitude. Ter often heard a distant choir singing in the dead of night, and once I felt someone squeeze my heel as he/she/it passed by my bed.

We had squirrels, wasps and rats too, over the years, not to mention a plague of silverfish that was never really solved because the plumbing leaked so badly. We froze in winter and sweltered in summer. Neighbours—some good, some annoying—came and went until we became the dowager tenants who had survived four property management companies.

What we did not survive was the change of ownership in 2007.

I often wondered what happened to #16 after Ter and I abandoned hope in 2011. The place needed some serious renovation, as no maintenance had been done in years and the ceiling around the skylights remained open to the shingles after the new owners put them in that first winter. Whenever a tenant left, the suite was upgraded and the rent appropriately jacked. But Ter and I pulled a fast one by handing in our notice, so they had to rent it as it was because they needed the guaranteed income. One evening close to our end date, the property manager showed up with a viewer in tow (so much for 24 hours’ written notice), and we suspect the kid took it because, at that price and in that neighbourhood, he was young enough to endure rougher conditions than open ceilings and leaky pipes.

We were done. It was not a particularly peaceful parting.

After all these years, #16 is on the market again. Advertised as 1000 feet of loft-style living with geometric ceilings and industrial light fixtures, they have ripped out both the closets and the chimney in the bedroom hallway, torn out the wall that created the first bedroom, torn out the wall that created the second bedroom, filled in the bookcases and covered over the faux fireplace, knocked out the doorway to the kitchen and opened up the “ghost crossing” where the little red haired kid liked to hide ... in short, the place is gutted. Soulless. Everything is cold and sharp and jutting. The floors look great; but I dare anyone to keep the place warm with Shredded Wheat in the outside walls and ten foot ceilings at their highest point.

Not my problem, I know. It’s just that my heart broke a little more when I saw what had become of our charming, beautiful former home; the home we had loved and made our own even though we didn’t own it.

Sadly, it’s not always a tenant who destroys a rental suite.

Chirping

As Ter and I were leaving for work the other day, I casually said to one of the bears, “Cardie, you have the con.”

“Okay, Mum,” he replied.

Fast forward to that evening. Ter picked me up from a massage appointment after work and the house was dead dark when we arrived home. She unlocked the door and swung it open for me to go ahead. I started slowly up the stairs, nursing a knee that had just endured a bone-deep fingering courtesy of my RMT.

Chirp! said the smoke detector, advising us that the battery was dead.

“Well, that answers my question,” I remarked.

“What question is that?” Ter asked from below.

“I’d been wondering if that alarm even has a battery.”

Really. Five years into our residency and the alarm hadn’t so much as peeped.

“It’s a nine volt, right?” I asked, trying not to limp as I fetched the stepladder from the back hall.

“I think so,” Ter replied. “Geez, I hope we have a spare.” She went straight to the kitchen stash and hallelujah! A nine volt battery was nestled among the plethora of AAs we keep on hand for our gazillion remotes.

She was brave enough to try the ladder first, but even with my bum knee, she’s not as steady on her feet as I am, so I got the short straw. (Actually, I practically thrust her aside to “let me do it, dammit!”) Up I went, recalling the old alarm at Rockland and what a pain it had been to get into the battery compartment. I can puzzle out just about anything given time, and after a few seconds of eyeballing this one, I pushed on the little door. It popped open without protest. Too easy! I happily pulled the battery and exchanged it for the replacement Ter handed up to me.

All the while, every thirty seconds, the alarm cheerily went Chirp! While I was up there, I decided to test the alarm. Darned near blew out my eardrums, but the thing worked so I closed the compartment door and came down the ladder. Ter and I high-fived, did the power pose (there’s nothing two girls and a Tiguan can’t do!), and I hefted the ladder down the hall.

I opened the back door and … Chirp!

Ter and I traded scowls. “That battery must be dead too,” I said.

“Gods know how old it is,” she morosely agreed.

I brought back the ladder. She steadied it and I climbed back up to see what the frack was going on. I pulled the battery and flipped it end to end. “Oh yeah,” I said, “it’s been leaking.”

“Great,” she said, dryly. We looked at each other until one of us suggested we might be able to leave it until morning.

The alarm disagreed. Chirp!

Turns out its one of those safety coded ones that’s wired into the house and won’t shut up unless a working battery is installed.

I came back down the ladder. “I’ll go,” I said, meaning to the hardware store.

Ter gave me the shark-Finn look. “Not with your knee. I’ll go.” But I think it was more to spare herself the intermittent and insistent Chirp!

She was back in twenty minutes, the new battery was installed and the ladder posted in its designated spot shortly thereafter. Blessed silence descended. My knee was treated to some ice, and the evening passed as usual. We only wondered for a minute or two exactly when the alarm had begun to chirp, as no one had been home for most of the day and the bears weren’t saying.

But the next work day, as we were getting ready to leave, Cardigan piped up, “Mum, I don’t want to have the con anymore.”

Better Times Ahead

Life is pretty good. My problems are all First World. This isn’t a negation of their existence, it’s just a recognition that problems of any ilk are relative.

Relative, not relatives.

Change continues. How I feel about some things has shifted, and that shift has resulted in an uncomfortable dissatisfaction and the prevailing sense that it’s time for Ter and me to move on.

I rounded the corner from Clover Point after work one day and was amazed to see the beauty in the above photo sitting a stone’s throw off the breakwater, so close to shore that I initially feared she’d run aground. In truth, I have no idea how deep the water is, though the Swiftsure yacht race starts from here every year, so it must be deep enough. In any event, the appearance of this one was so rare as to inspire as much concern as wonder. As I watched, however, she floated gently in a circle, presenting me with her profile and her dinky dinghy trailing aft. Ah, I thought, she’s dropped anchor … but why? There was no one on deck, no activity in the surrounding water. She was like a ghost ship, appearing from nowhere for no discernible reason, destined to depart in silence.

Twilight fell. Closing up the Ocean Room at bedtime, I saw that the ship was still in the bay, her dual masts now floodlit and the cabin sparkling with lamps set in the windows. She was the most beautiful thing I had seen in that patch of water, ever. So calm, so serene. The ocean itself was uncommonly tranquil, seemingly respective of her placid majesty. The sky darkened and she glowed more brightly, as suffused with mystery as she was with light. I was mesmerized. I was also certain that she’d be gone the next morning.

I got up in the middle of the night to check. By then the sky was so black she stood out as a constellation, a series of jewels strung in sequence to suggest the shape of a sailboat, but she was still there. She was still there at six a.m., backlit by the dawn, as stunning in silhouette as she had been awash in spotlight. I couldn’t figure it out. I had still seen no people, and the dinghy still bobbed about on its tether.

It was my day off, fortunately. I sent Ter to work and started my routine—dusting and yoga, to be followed by meditation in advance of being a writer. Sometimes I practice the meditation on my yoga disk. More often of late, I practice a mediation that Ter downloaded some months ago, but it’s on the computer so I have to set up in the Ocean Room. Just past nine o’clock, I walked into the OR and there she was, our mysterious maiden, cruising nonchalantly away from the shore on her way to … where?

Neither her presence nor its effect on me made any sense. I only know that it struck a profound chord at the time … and today I see a symbolism that could apply to our time in this locale.

She came from nowhere, she created something wondrous, then she sailed for her next port of call.

Okay, Universe. Bring me that horizon.

Bump in the Night

I think I’m dreaming when I hear someone screaming for help in the dark. Strident, desperate, truly panicked. Once I know I’m awake, my next thought is that the girl downstairs is in trouble. She’s pregnant and her filmmaker husband is out of town; they moved in two days earlier and if something is wrong with the baby …

The screaming gets louder. Someone starts hammering on our door. “She’s going to die! Help me; help me; why won’t you help me?”

Oh, God, it is the baby!

Ter is awake by now; I’m already dressed and flipping on the lights. Still confused, I blurt that it’s the girl downstairs and what the—

A shuddering sound: wood splintering as if a door is being kicked in, glass breaking, and the screaming in a voice gone hoarse. Ter beside me at the top of the stairs. “What is going on?”

I’m thinking, Great, the new neighbour is bipolar and having a seizure. I’m shaking with adrenaline, my mind racing in circles: call 911, go downstairs, see what the hell is happening in our building fo—

There’s an almighty BANG! and the voice receding as the owner takes her screaming back out to the street. Still shaking and moving by instinct rather than common sense, I take my phone and descend the stairs to our front door. There’s a jagged hole in the stained glass at eye level. “Oh, my God,” I say, “the window is broken.” I open the door and find that the foyer has been trashed. Glass shards are strewn across the carpet. The floor lamp that stood in the corner is bent in half and the shade lies in pieces. The building’s front door has been flung wide open and one of the porch chairs blocks the exit. The SOS sounds like she’s heading toward the point.

The door on my left opens cautiously and standing there in her jammies is our new neighbour. “Was that you?” I ask, stupidly.

She shakes her head, half-numb.

To help with the picture, our building is a five unit strata – two suites on the main floor, two on the second and the penthouse up top. The foyer is square, the main floor doors across from each other, the second floor doors side by side. This night, the folks in the other main floor suite are in Toronto, and the fellow who lives above them only emerges when our voices wake him. He’s as gobsmacked as the rest of us.

The screaming outside continues toward the water. Ter is on the porch, listening. “Ruthie,” she says, “time to call 911.”

So I make my first ever 911 call. I describe the events and give directions as best I can. Within seconds of me disconnecting, the cops arrive, a fleet of them, lights and sirens galore, accompanied by two ambulances, a fire truck, and what appears to be a marine rescue boat offshore. Whatever it is, its lights are aimed at the beach. By now I’ve called the folks in the penthouse and they have joined the rest of us on the porch. “Welcome to the neighbourhood,” someone says to the new girl. “This never happens here,” someone else says, but she is adding security to the top of the agenda for the strata’s annual general meeting this weekend. (She proves to be a force of nature herself; when all is said and done, she and hubby are likely to be a super addition to the community.)

Eventually, half of the vehicles depart and an officer makes her way over to the house. Turns out that a mother and daughter have gone on a drinking bender and something went wrong. The cops found them in the water, and if they can get a confession, does anyone want to press charges? A conviction is unlikely, we’re told, given that there are no eyewitnesses or video surveillance to support any action taken. Names and phone numbers are exchanged, the officer leaves, Ter helps to clean up the lobby while I stand with the men and ponder the insurance portent. None of us gets back to sleep before four that morning, but we retire as a group more strongly bonded than we were before the incident occurred.

Since then, we’ve heard that the malcontents apologized to the police but they have no priors so no charges are recommended (to which I reply, how does one go about getting a prior unless charges are pressed?). The broken glass in three of the four doors is presently being repaired, and I presume the strata’s insurance is covering the bulk of the cost. Ter and I have an advantage here: being renters, we just comply with whatever work must be done and don’t worry about the finances.

This does not spare us the slings and arrows suffered by the owners, however. Since we moved in, we’ve been embraced as members of the family and have weathered the same storms as everyone else—everything from an upstairs water leak soaking our carpet to street parking wars to disgruntled neighbours foiling our recycling collection, not to mention the summer of constructing the Trump Tower out back. There is no dissention among the residents, I’m relieved to say, and now that the kids have moved in downstairs, we’re hoping for a warm and peaceful winter.

There’s no place like home.

Bearing Up

The wee bears have had a hard week. Construction began on the penthouse elevator a few weeks ago,  so the house has been a war zone with hard hat dudes and power tools running amok in the back yard. They’re used to the drilling and hammering by now, but a new twist occurred after Ter’s day off on Monday.

Work on the elevator paused while an old oil tank was dug out of the garden and removed during the past few days—I considered suggesting to the strata that they install a hot tub rather than refilling the hole, but we’re only renting and about to renew our lease for another year, so it might be prudent to restrain myself. This project started huge and anyone who’s embarked on home renovations knows that the plan rarely follows, well, the plan. Better for the renters to keep mum until the worst is over, then bring it up as a joke during the celebratory barbeque in September … assuming it’s finished by then.

Anyway, Rufus is crankier than usual, his bedroom compatriots are misbehaving from nerves, and the kitchen midgets are clinging like the last two Cheerios in the bowl, so I’m spending my day off reassuring them with a domestic presence. I’ve dusted up the house, baked a batch of rhubarb crumble muffins, and am just bashing out this post before I make tea and start writing in earnest. Periodic checks indicate that the bears are relaxing a little—thank the gods that the weekend will be quiet!

The “Big Pink” Baby

The couple downstairs brought their new baby girl home a few weeks ago. With Ter and me living directly above her, we’ve expected to be “up with the baby” of a night since she got out of the hospital. Despite her parents’ apologies for the screaming, however, we have yet to hear anything more than occasional cooing and, even more infrequently, a little fussing. I reckon once she gets some power behind her lungs, we’ll hear her more often and that’s okay. It’s what babies do, and when she gets rolling, I hope I’ll feel more for the new parents than myself. Children were not in my cards on this go-round, so I’ve been spared the anxiety attached to being responsible for a newborn, an anxiety which our sleep-deprived neighbours have admitted to feeling as they set out on this journey—without a map, may I add.

I do wonder why babies cry, though. I mean, really. What do they have to cry about? I get the wet diaper discomfort and I imagine the warm squishy didie isn’t much fun, either. I understand being First World hungry and the startling sharpness of intestinal gas pains; I also get the too-hot, too-cold dilemma, especially when you don’t control the thermostat and lack the motor skills to manage your own sweater, but other than those trifling irritants, there’s no reason for spontaneous squalling—right?

Well …

Something occurred to me while revisiting The Tale of the Body Thief—the story where Lestat de Lioncourt, after two hundred years, decides he’s done with being a vampire and wants to be mortal again. Enter a man with the ability to force a soul from its flesh and take that body as his own. He convinces Lestat to switch bodies with him and Lestat recklessly agrees to try it for a day. Naturally, the Body Thief absconds with Lestat’s immortal body and the chase begins as the ousted vampire sets out to regain his perfected form. There’s other stuff woven through the tale—love and redemption and salvation and reconciliation etc.—but Lestat’s memories prove to be grossly over-romanticized when he opens his mortal eyes and cannot figure out why the light is so dim. The weight of his mortal flesh is overwhelming, the body is clumsy and sluggish, the senses are muzzy and indistinct, and then, oh joy, he catches a wicked savage cold and ends up in the hospital. In due course, he grows accustomed to his cumbersome state, but as I read his story, it dawned on me that his plight was not unlike what our souls must face when we are born into the human experience.

Imagine coming from a place of weightlessness, where the light is luminous and never truly dark, where we can transport ourselves on the strength of a whim, and landing in a dimension where gravity keeps us grounded, where sight and sound are murky and lack resonance, where we must learn to express ourselves with speech rather than a telepathic flash of imagery. Imagine being part of a great collective consciousness, of sharing thoughts and dreams and visions with ease, of belonging to something bigger and more powerful than oneself, then being disconnected, singled out and alone.

I cannot say for certain that our combined essence actually exists on such a plane, but I’m pretty darned sure it’s vastly different from what we know as carbon-based life forms assigned to this intensely physical phase. Being mortal is damned difficult work; it’s lonely, exhausting, and painful, and I’m fortunate that I don’t remember where I came from, otherwise I might have quit a long time ago. Never mind that I chose this estate, that I clamoured to come here and learn something from the struggle. I asked for this. I wanted to be mortal, to experience Contrast in the best way possible, which was to squeeze myself into this bag of meat and bone and go forth with good intention … and no idea how hard it would be. Yes, there is joy in this state. There is love and pleasure and music and the flavour of chocolate, but these things are gained as you go.

It surely must be worse for babies and small children, so fresh from the shell and yet tied to the go-before. Who wouldn’t be dismayed about unforeseen constriction of the flesh, not to mention the isolation that comes with it? We are all human, yet the physical condition cuts us off from our fellows unless we make the effort to reconnect, not as we connect in our soul state, but through social contact and mutual cooperation. Babies don’t speak our language and we’ve lost our ability to communicate without words. How frustrating and how scary it is to find oneself in a world so foreign when all the brochures promised a great adventure.

Maybe that’s why babies cry. When the “Big Pink” baby ramps up the volume and I happen to be nearby, I might just ask her—or maybe I’ll just cuddle her, and assure her that though she may feel otherwise, she is not alone.

100 Years B.P.



The Big Pink 2013

The house where we live is known as The Big Pink. It was built in 1913. Yesterday, the strata threw it a birthday party to which we – the Lone Renters – were invited, along with numerous friends of our four neighbours, and as many previous owners/tenants as the search crew could find.

It was a gas.

We didn’t stay long, however. The annual Moss Street Paint-In happened yesterday as well, and as it’s a perennial must-do event, we took a couple of hours to stroll up and down the street that practically backs onto the Pink property, checking out the artists and the crowds and the market at the corner, all in pristine sunshine and a festive state of Now.

Then we dropped into the party. The planning committee had researched the house’s history through the City Archives, and posted around the yard were pictures of the Pink and its neighbours as newly-constructed buildings, bits and blurbs of the City of Victoria throughout the last century, and we saw our own names added to the tenants’ list dating back to the 1920s and 30s.

Four suites for 80-plus years and five since the penthouse was put on in the late 1990s. All were rental units until 1995, when it was converted to condos – this loved and lovely old house has weathered a hundred west coast winters and the combined energy of its occupants over a full century.

If the Big Pink could talk, what would she say?

Be welcome. Be safe. Be at peace.

That’s what I felt on my first visit in July 2012. It turns out that the current residents are all kind and generous people and I have grown very fond of them, but back then, there was only the house to make an impression. After 100 years of sheltering souls, the Pink was willing to embrace and shelter Ter and me (and we were badly wounded, but that’s another story).

If any ghosts live here, they are contented ones. It’s not a tormented, haunted house. It’s not a sick and neglected house. It’s not even the oldest house we’ve called home – but it is easily the most benevolent and tranquil house, and we are immeasurably grateful that it found us.

Happy 100^th, old girl. Long may ye reign.