Hit and Miss #320: Home (anew)
Whew. It’s been a week—a month—a season—a year. Fall’s a third over, but it’s flown by. A month ago we returned from Japan, and turned in short order to packing up the apartment. We moved this week, and we’re so glad for it.
Byward was wearing us down. I love the area, but the city seems determined to keep it from its potential as a dense, livable core. We couldn’t go anywhere without crossing a river of cars, and the noise—SO MUCH NOISE—, the worst of it vehicular, had seeped deep into us. Our building and unit were lovely, but it was time to go. (To be clear, that makes me really sad! I really do love the area, and its potential. But it’s getting neither the vision nor support it and its residents—all its residents—need, and I don’t see that changing for a while. Relatedly / unrelatedly, it doesn’t even have a produce market anymore!)
We’ve moved to a familiar neighbourhood. Still close to our favourite spots (we’ve already done a Perfect Books run!), but a bit out from the hustle and bustle. It’s been a load off the mind and body to take morning and evening walks, enjoying the changing leaves and taking the area in from a new perspective.
We’re living in an older house now, a little one from the 40s. Renting, to be clear—we don’t have anywhere near the kind of money to buy a house these days. I struggled with a few things, saying goodbye to the familiar and hello to the new, one of them being how an older house isn’t nearly as sealed up as the fifth-floor, concrete-encased, 20-year-old apartment we’d been living in. We’re not the only being living in and around it, in other words. My therapist had a good perspective on this, though, pointing out how the house “grows” things, versus the sterile nature of an apartment at a remove from the ground—with greater potential for us to grow here, too, I hope.
Regardless, we’re settling in nicely. The living room has an even grander wall of bookshelves than our old place, which we cheerily filled this morning. Sitting in the little den on the day we moved in, we saw a downy woodpecker and a few chickadees, all in a few minutes watching. I’ll miss the grand, institutional views of downtown Ottawa, of the centuries old buildings in our old courtyard, the Connaught building and Château Laurier beyond. But we’re swapping those for more personal, natural views, trading the institutional scale for a human scale—and I have a hunch it’ll be a good trade in the end. (I’ve been thinking, as Alexis Madrigal did, of the trees in the yard, and the stories they could tell.)
The move has felt both momentous and mundane. Hiring movers (I can’t recommend First Rate Movers enough if you’re moving to / from / within Ottawa) helped immensely, lightening the physical toll of the move (which has been a barrier to my willingness to move in the past!). I struggled a lot with committing to moving in general—though finding the right place helped a lot—partly because of feelings of attachment to our old place, and of what it represented for me. It had been the first place I lived truly on my own, at a time of my life when I’d been more heavily invested in my career and so on—all of which has happily changed since then, not least with the introduction of T and our wonderful, loving partnership, which has made a move like this feel not only possible but truly worthwhile.
But it’s been good to remember how people do and don’t change as they change where they live. There’ll be loads of change ahead, informed and enabled by where we live, but I’ve taken comfort in how we aren’t determined by where we live—and that any influence is bidirectional, with the opportunity to influence how a place changes us based on what we do with it. (A, for the record, hasn’t changed a whit since we moved—he very quickly mapped the place out, found his preferred sleeping spots, knocked a plant or two off a shelf, continued using his buttons, and has otherwise been his normal lovable, loving self.)
(A brief aside to note that we haven’t had WiFi for the time we’ve been here so far—other than tethering to my phone for a family call—and that it’s been wonderful to be more or less disconnected. Sure, we still use our phones, but not having much reason to open up a laptop, where I seem to fall even more deeply into the tabs and so on, has definitely contributed to the calm.)
Anyhow—there’ll be more, no doubt, in the months and years ahead about the scenes out our windows, the changes we’re making and experiencing. In the meantime, though, all the best for the week ahead.
Lucas