YVR -- YYZ -- MCI -- YYZ -- YVR

At airport, heading back to TO. Thinking about the paradox of my life, general and overall happiness and contentment mixed with immediate crankiness. High auditory sensitivity because of hormones, lack of sleep, and wanting to pinch the guy whose hiking boots are going SCHLUMP SCHLUMP SCHLUMP, while reveling a little bit in the iphone-captured photo of my windy, chilly seawall walk last night. I'm going to miss my little house.

Sometimes it feels

as though so much of what I've collected in my life led me to this little house. I don't even remember acquiring this -- I found it in a box of photos -- and it's a bit twee for anywhere else I've ever lived. But it fits this corner perfectly.

Dusk

I've been trying to walk or run the WR seawall every day. Am finding a rhythm where, on the evenings I'm home, I go out around 830 for an hour or so. On a cooler non-holiday night, the seawall is almost empty, the tide is high, the sky pink. I really feel calmer and more peaceful than I ever remember.

Cautionary icons

I’m not sure why I’ve been so non-posty since I got here. I’m happy, so not feeling all reflecty-angsty, but I’ve also been relatively solo, so not full of Amusing Stories. Just me, liking my little house, liking what it does for me, relaxed and feeling like life is ripe. Duck’s back, water, about most things.

It is odd living in a town that feels like I’m visiting it for so many reasons. WR is very white, and the average demographic is downright elderly. I venture out into the town itself to buy food, to buy gelato and eat it on the seawall, to use the landscape as my own sprinting/breathing/striding/riding platform. There’s a tall hill behind my house that I can march purposely up, strengthening legs, and a seawall to run along when it’s not thronged with moseyers. In some ways, the town and the people blur for me, and it’s not that different from living in the country – I orient myself to my view of the water, my sweet house, the hills or road under my feet or tires, google maps to figure out how to get elsewhere, my people in the computer.

One of the effects of this has been to test my mettle on what I can do on my own. There’s been a lot of Assembling required in this move, flat ikea boxes that pop up into bookshelves, bedroom furniture, a little table to trap my keys and glasses at the door so I don’t lose them for good. Too many of the instructions for my furniture started out with a little drawing of the sad man with the aching back and broken pieces of wood around him, much happier when he has a little friend to help him out. Not hard to find symbolism in that.



Nor hard to find symbolism in one of those pieces being the building of my own bed, after I got home from a pleasant but uninspiring online date the other night. Determination, stacks of books, a lot of swearing, especially when I dropped the box spring into the room at large, taking out my alarm clock permanently. But I got it together, along with the dresser and nightstand, my ridiculous snow-white duvet cover,



inordinately proud of myself for figuring out the things that in my previous life have belonged to my competent brother in law, or butch and handy ex. Just me, creating the space that is ineffably soothing, ineffably promising.

Fireworks

I had a puttery canada day, after having french toast and bacon on my deck. Recreating the most perfect breakfast I ever had anywhere, in Queenstown New Zealand in 1996. Then some work, and an abortive bike ride (didn't realize until I was 5 miles out that I'd forgotten my helmet), then more work, then a really miserable run (every step a plod, leavened only by concentrating on the month's old Canada Reads discussions that highlighted The Book of Negroes, which I just read and was utterly immersed in). Then, after shaking the peaches of the tree of plenty of fish, took myself out for dinner on the deck of my local seafood shack. Was gifted with a sweet server named Lizzie who encouraged me to stay until the fireworks. So I had a second glass of wine and did.

And thought about my dad, who loved fireworks, along with amusement parks and freaks, and F, who didn't let us break up just before the holidays partly because he didn't want to think about watching the New Year's Eve fireworks off the space needle by himself. (Not, without ME, mind you, but by himself). And instead of feeling wistful, I was just noting. People of my past, me on my own, decent and unspectacular fireworks, people in couples and families, and me, just fine. My dinner, my engrossing Ian McEwan novel, the sweet young server. The residue of the pink sky over the water. All just fine. Maybe for the first time ever.

To be honest

I'm happy. Despite the fatigue, the yappy dog, and the swamp-moss mold dripping from the shelves in my fetid fridge filled with bacterially exploded salmon (nice treat to come back to), I really love being in BC. I cannot state sharply enough how much my chest fills when I see the sea as a part of everyday life.

I'm having a kayak lesson in the morning with some dude from the internet, and I took great joy in being all Organized and Competent and putting my racks on the car myself. If I can load the boat on my own... well, that will be a whole new level.

I'll let Billy Collins speak for me

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Billy Collins

Maybe it's the weather

But I'm finding that my little way-up-high perch in Toronto is giving me the same kind of fresh aspect and sense of possibilities that I had in my borrowed space in pdx 3 years ago. No hills on the edges, but discovering a new neighbourhood is feeling good. I do miss the scruffy uncertainty of the market -- the guy chasing another guy down the street yelling "he's a peeping tom!", the unexpected interpretive dance in the street behind Kat as she sang On the Highwire at Graffiti's, the bird lady with her odd little tiny-wheeled bicycle and careful costumes, the flakes of coffee beans settling in your hair when Moonbean was roasting. Here it's a little sterile, a lot yuppie, very full of couples. But being this high above gives me a sense of breathing space I didn't have from the 4th floor.

Very conscious that doing the things that are hard *always* gives me energy in the end -- so really not understanding why I handle the stress of doing it so very very badly. Renee commented that I was as tense about going to Africa as I was about this move, and that turned out to be magnificent. Now to somehow be heedful of that.

Off to a family wedding, feeling a little bereft to be dressing up without someone to twirl for. Beginning to think about the concept of going on a date again. Not as hopeful about that as I might have been three years ago -- but edging into it.