Monthly Archives: January 2020

About That Time We Moved (Which Time?)

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People say that we move a lot.

I guess if you consider that Rick and I have lived in 7 different homes since we got married over 27 years ago, mayyyyybeeee that’s a lot? Two of those places we lived in for less than a year. The house we are moving from this weekend has had our longest run: 11 and a half years. But those moves that happened so close together? Family members whose muscle we call upon to help – they still think we move too much.

I was recently explaining this to a friend and said that really, they weren’t all our fault. And then when I started recounting the houses to her, I realized: it’s all our fault. Really. We could have stayed put more after we initially moved from Edmonton out of our honeymoon apartment that didn’t allow kids. (But then we had a kid. Our fault.)

The first house that we rented when we moved to Vermilion we “showed” to a retired lady from our church who wanted to move to town to be closer to her husband in the nursing home and couldn’t find anything suitable. We solved that problem for her. We thought our house was pretty nice and, alas, so did she. Our fault.

That was one of the less-than-a-year houses. The next one – our first house purchase – was a little less than five years. But then we started to get ideas about living on an acreage and we moved. Oops, our fault.

We lived on “Coyote Acres” for over 5 years – the second-longest stint. And it was a wonderful place to raise three little boys where they could play and explore outdoors, where we had our one-and-only-ever dog, where we started reading the Harry Potter books out loud together as a family and where Daddy built the coolest ever basement fort for the boys. But then we realized we couldn’t afford the acreage anymore and we traded houses with someone back in town, seriously downsizing ourselves and circling the wagons. But pretty much our fault.

The next house was another short stint: only ten months. We put some sweat equity into the house and liked it so much, we decided to sell it. By this time we had the fixer-upper bug, so we found a deal of a house to move to. The deal being it needed a lot of work and we considered entering one of those ugliest-kitchen-in-Canada contests. But the buying and selling and fixing? Our choice, our fault.

At the three year mark, we moved again. It wasn’t our fault that our best friends in Vermilion were moving overseas and needed to sell their house. We were just helping, right?

It’s been a pretty great house, this one that we’re about to leave. It’s was big enough to accommodate our extended family gatherings – including 3 graduation parties and one wedding for our kids, plus lots of Christmases. It was a great landing spot for all the teenage friends the kids brought home. And we loved the location: on the provincial park that you could get out and enjoy in less than a minute or just open up the blinds and enjoy the view.

But then it got too big. It’s not our fault the kids moved away. (Is it?) It’s not that we stopped liking our house – on the contrary, we fixed it so much to suit us that we liked it more and more each year. Is “too big” a good enough reason to move? Maybe. Probably. It’s kinda our fault we didn’t realize that our house would someday outgrow us.

And so we are moving again. Although I am one of those weird people who actually likes packing and unpacking, it’s a bit stressful as we get close to the actual moving day – did we do everything we needed to do? Where can we find another 30 boxes? Did I pack the packing tape? Where are we gonna sleep tonight? But the adventure of going someplace new, setting up new routines, figuring out where everything goes and what we can get rid of – I (and I think, Rick, too) like that challenge. It’s our fault. And that’s okay.

About Shovelling Snow

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For this month and the last one, we own two houses in Vermilion. We are downsizing from our current 4-bedrooms-are-empty-why-are-we-still-cleaning-them house to a much more manageable 4-bedrooms-still-are empty-but-one’s-an-office-and-one’s-a-closet-so-not-really-as-bad. And we are losing a whole floor, so there’s that.

With said early acquisition of the new house – for purposes of painting and re-carpeting BEFORE we move in – there’s an extra two month burden of mortgage payments, taxes, utilities – but we went into that part knowingly.

But maybe I forgot about the snow.

Yes, with two houses, there’s two driveways. Granted, the downsized house has just a teeny-tiny driveway compared to the old house. But it also has a sidewalk that must be shovelled or else People Get Mad and you become A Bad Neighbor and A Lousy Citizen. (Also, I learned this week, that dog-owners don’t retrieve their dog’s poop from deeply snowy sidewalks because it just disappears down into the snow and freezes to the sidewalk, irretrievable and undetectable, until my snow shovel hits it and I nearly go end-over-end like hitting my brakes too hard on a bike. That stuff sticks.)

If it was summer, we would have two lawns to mow. But grass grows in a rather predictable fashion and usually one budgets once a week to keep the blades at bay.

Snow is a much more arbitrary foe.

Granted my new driveway is teeny-tiny. The first couple skiffs of snow were easily managed in record time. But a small driveway makes no difference when Canada decides to bless us with frozen moisture. It can PILE UP. And so I find myself getting a workout of workouts when I let it do just that.

There’s really no getting around it. Like dirty dishes or laundry, sooner or later, chores have to be dealt with or else you commit to living in a pigsty or getting stuck in your own driveway. It’s one of those “life things” and having a good attitude about it just feels better than crabbing about it. But if I do descend into the woe-is-me’s, I try to remember my mom.

A few years ago, Mom moved from farm to town and she, too, had a driveway that she needed to keep clean for the above-said reasons. And the winter after she moved in was a snowy one. Never one to shirk work, that winter, however, Mom wasn’t able to get out to shovel the snow. A couple of carpal-tunnel surgeries and the worst flu she ever succumbed to kept her in the house. We kids and grandkids would all take our turns cleaning her very long driveway.

One day I sent Tim over to Baba’s house to do the job. He told me later that for the entire time, she presided at the window, vicariously shovelling snow with him. When Tim went in after for the usual Baba-mandated-snack, she told him a story about how her neighbor across the street threw a bag of garbage in his bin every day. Amazed, she asked Tim, “Who has that much garbage?”

She had become a watcher. But she didn’t like it. She would have given anything to go out and shovel her own snow and be otherwise too busy to notice the neighbor’s garbage idiosyncrasies.

And so I think about Mom when I shovel snow. I try to be thankful for what I can still do because someday it might be taken away from me. I try to see snow and work as a blessing and not a necessary evil. And I even try not to go too fast.

Because trust me: that frozen dog poop will kill you.

About Happiness

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In July of 2012, I found myself in a bookstore in an airport en route to Haiti. We had an eight (!) hour layover and I had made the mistake of not bringing along a book, not just to while away the hours in the airport, but on the plane itself, which to me is prime reading time. I mean, what else can you really do on a plane, except sleep or get annoyed by the in-flight entertainment system? My eyes landed on the bright blue cover of The Happiness Project and dare I say? – the rest of my life changed.

What could Gretchen Rubin, an New York lawyer-turned-writer, who lives on the Upper West Side of New York City – arguably the most affluent neighborhood in Manhattan – have to say to me about happiness? And how would this edify my trip to Haiti, which was still reeling from the devastating 2010 earthquake?

As Rubin points out in a subsequent book, Happier at Home, we can actually learn a lot from one person’s idiosyncratic experiences than from more general or philosophical treatises on such subjects as happiness. And it turns out, it’s actually the little things – maybe only important to us – that can make us happier.

Although Rubin structures her project over the year, each month tackling an area of her life for improvement and awareness, I think it’s in the overarching principles in the two lists at the beginning of the book that I learned the most: Gretchen’s Twelve Commandments and her Secrets of Adulthood.

The first commandment? Be Gretchen. This in and of itself absolves her of any need to write this book for Everyman. While she is very good at acknowledging that most other people are not like her – quirky, un-adventuresome, and, pretty square actually – she is unapologetically Herself. I like that so much. One listen to the podcast she hosts with her sister Elizabeth and you can quickly pick up her enthusiasm for the most mundane aspects of life (like going to bed early) and other people’s happiness idiosyncrasies (like learning Latin – for fun.)

Hot on the heels of that sentiment is one of her Secrets of Adulthood: You can choose what to do; you can’t choose what you like to do. Wait, what? I always thought that with a good attitude you could learn to like anything. But the truth is, a good attitude will help you get through Latin lessons even if you hate it, but nothing can make you like it if you just don’t.

This was revolutionary for me to admit to myself. I always thought that if something was good, you were supposed to like it, or else it signified a flaw in your character. But not everyone – thank goodness – is the same. Why can’t we dislike things that may seem good to someone else?

Take my trip to Haiti. As a church group we participated in two activities: visiting and playing with kids at an orphanage and working in 90-plus-degree weather building a cinder block wall on the site of the new orphanage. On our last day, we were given the choice: go for one last visit with the kids or stay and work the rest of the (hot) afternoon on the wall.

I chose the wall. It was exhausting work, but physical labor has always been a preference for me. The kids were lovely when we visited – I had several “hairdressers” preside over me and cornrow my hair in a matter of minutes and some kids just wanted to be cuddled or play soccer. But it just wasn’t my wheelhouse. I still believe pouring into the kids was more valuable, but I couldn’t make myself like it more.

Happiness, as Gretchen Rubin found out, is not something that just happens. Maybe instead, it’s already there inside of us and we just need the right focus to recognize it.

About Waiting

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Christmas was a weird one this year. It started out with one of the kids getting sick the weekend before and then one by one, each of us succumbed to a very nasty and long-lasting flu. Rick got it a couple days before Christmas, I got it Christmas Day and everyone we “celebrated” with that day got mowed down as well.

Sickness is no respecter of persons or calendars.

As much as you can dose yourself with Vitamin C and Oil of Oregano or feed a cold or starve a fever or whatever conventional wisdom would suggest you do, at some point with illness, you just have to buckle in for the ride.

And wait.

There are, of course, tried and true methods of trying to make the waiting more bearable. There’s moaning. There’s napping. There’s trying to decide if you want to eat in spite of your taste buds having gone AWOL. There’s Netflix and now, Disney Plus.

But mostly it’s waiting.

Christmas itself can kind of be a holding pattern. At the end of the year, along comes this day at which point, unless you shop for Christmas gifts at 7-Eleven, you can no longer do anything to prepare. All the flurry of the previous month’s shopping and baking and pre-Christmas revelry comes to a grinding halt and we enter into The Day.

Oh sure, I know it’s not like this for everyone. There’s Christmas travellers and there’s holiday workers like nurses and snow-removal crews that, God bless them, have places to go and things to do. But I’ve always noticed that in general, at Christmas we move into a suspension that if we hold our breath, we can find at least one moment to keep still and enter into the giant snow globe of our memories.

And then after Christmas, the world bounces back into normalcy and it’s over again for another year. The New Year looms, spring-loaded with all it’s potential of days and months “with no mistakes in it yet” as Anne Shirley used to say. We start to make resolutions and workout goals and everyone on the internet wants to sell you their planner that comes complete with unicorns and fairies.

This year sickness has made me press pause a little longer. The snow-globe moments were tinged with the green of sickness this year, but they still happened: all the kids around the table, laughing and playing games when the worst of it let up, going to see the new Star Wars movie. Waiting is hard, but waiting always gives its gifts.

I hope you all had at least one snow globe moment to carry you through to next year.