Putting Down Roots

The minute the kids were raised, Hal and I left our tiny suburban castle to move into downtown Toronto, to an old three storied brick house seventeen feet wide.

We would have stayed there forever but when he got sick we needed a smaller place that I could manage while looking after him.

We moved into a tiny freestanding condo five months before he died and as soon as I could sell the place with the sad memories I relocated to another city, with two full moving vans of possessions.

I had fun painting and papering the new house with the cute little pool but when the nearby sounds of car crashes on the crescent were getting to be the regular event on Saturday nights I moved on to a quieter but larger house, again with two moving vans full of possessions.

I knew I had found the perfect place this time. It was a four- bedroom back split with an enormous pool, although I didn’t know that at the time because it was covered with snow. I bought in the dead of winter, and because I bought under power of sale, I didn’t know what shape anything was in.

When the snow melted I saw that the pool was not only huge but the equipment was unusable and three years worth of leaves had accumulated in the bottom. In case you haven’t learned this first hand, there is a lot of karma that comes with buying a power of sale house. That pool and a nasty neighbor were mine.

I loved the house, but after a few years it finally occurred to me that if I had that same pesky gene as my relatives I would live to be well into the nineties or worse and there wouldn’t be any money left for me to exist.

It was time to seriously downsize.

This time my daughter, Pioneer Melissa stepped in and she had an agenda. She accompanied me during my house- hunting with immense enthusiasm and it seemed to be her goal to find an insulated chicken coop big enough to house three bantam hens. I managed to do a little better than that. The new house is two blocks away from Melissa (that is her punishment) and is semi detached, a house joined in the middle to its Siamese twin. In the west they would call that a duplex.

When it was time to pack, that determined female who lives for a challenge, offered to help. No, she demanded.

You have to understand something about this woman; she would cook all the family meals in the back yard over a roaring fire pit if she thought she could get away with it. She gets misty –eyed at the thought of a sod hut with a loft for the kids to sleep. I am amazed that she doesn’t make her own lye soap and that she actually uses a real washing machine, the kind requiring electricity. She dyes her own cotton to make the quilts she designs and it’s only a question of time before the first sheep appears in the garden with a spinning wheel on order.

Anyway, when Pioneer Melissa stepped in, I knew I would have enjoyable company for the almost three months I had to pack, but I also realized I was going to have to account for every item that went into a carton.

Her constant reminder was that I was shifting from two thousand square feet to nine hundred and fifty. I was never good at math so that didn’t seem a big problem.

At first we quibbled over every saucepan—okay I have more than one so sue me. After a while I relinquished those extra casserole dishes and furniture and absolutely fabulous things I planned to sort into artful collections some time. We put some furniture on consignment and when we ran out of patience and energy we dumped stuff out on the boulevard, under what we named “the free tree.”

Passers by loved us. It was like being the object of daily bus tours and everything under the tree was snapped up.

On moving day, a smaller than giant- size van appeared and I wondered if it would hold more than the china and sheets and refrigerator but to my surprise everything almost fitted. It took all four grunting, sweating movers to get the lever fastened at the back and even then they had to take a rolled carpet into the cab with them. I left behind my beautiful big plants in their huge soy pots but by that time I was either exhausted or really into the idea of less- is- better.

We were so efficient that on my second day in the new house, Melissa appeared with her garden tools and enlarged a pitsy little bed in the back and we filled it with the plants we had carefully garnered from the old pace.

The thing is—there isn’t a challenge in moving anymore so I’m going to stay put until the family has the inevitable conference about where they’ll store me until I croak. Perhaps Melissa will have a barn with a nice stall. But that’s their problem.