This house, center-left, is my old house in Toronto. It's well over a hundred years old, situated in Cabbagetown, a central downtown area where 'way back, these were rooming houses for laborers, and front yards were planted with cabbages,or that's how the story goes.
On a recent quickie visit to Toronto, we detoured past my old house, down a narrow one-way street.
It's in a row of five houses linked together, each one seventeen feet wide. We were a mixture of "white painters" and homes for the helpless, a noisy union hall at the top of the street and a pub at the bottom.
At first, the front "yard" was cement and eventually I had a portion jack-hammered out and set in a raised bed where I planted the magnolia tree you can see flourishing at the left of the big window, and we installed the old stained glass transom over the front door.
We lived so close to the city center that we could walk anywhere.
Looking out the back kitchen window there were chestnut trees towering above and from the third floor deck we had a good view of the needle-like C.N.Tower in the distance.
We raised our six kids in a shoe-box house in the suburbs and when they flew the nest we moved into this umpteen room beauty and we used every inch.
Eventually this area became prime and when Hal got too sick to work, we sold the house for many times what we paid for it and we moved into a tiny place close to the hospital.
I've moved on and life is good but I still dream about that house and it's two ghosts.
I hope the present occupants are happy there.
1 comment:
What a beautiful place, Pat....there is such a lovely advantage to living close to everything in a city, while having the lovely trees and a bit of garden. It must have been a very nostalgic trip by your old home.
Thinking of you!
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