Tag Archives: moving

Sunshine Ceiling 4LYFE–Maybe

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Lately, my husband has been ending remarks with “…for the past two years.”

And I have been correcting him with “…for the past three years.”

That is how long it’s been since we moved our family back to the city—three years only, three years already. In a large family like ours, where seven timelines run simultaneously, three years is more like twenty-one. Graduations, promotions, publications, growth spurts, near misses, rescues, the death of our insane pet bird have all happened in that time. Romania and China have happened in that time, all based from our house in an aging suburb.

The house itself hasn’t fared as well as the rest of us. Wear and tear happen here to the power of seven as well. When we were trying to decide on a house to mortgage (it’s still too early for me to think of it as something we bought), we made lists of the improvements we’d have to do once we chose a place and moved into it. Once we decided, our home improvements started right away. Walls were painted, trees were planted, the forty-pound metal, office grade fluorescent light fixture which used to buzz and flicker over my head in my laundry room/office was taken down. The renovations started, and then they stopped.

 

wallpaper

No, I still haven’t peeled away this odd, flocked white wallpaper in my son’s bedroom. Frankly, the room is chilly in the winter and it might have been put up in the first place to provide a little extra insulation. Whatever its original purpose, no one cares that it’s still stuck to the house. When I told the boys, three years ago, that I was willing to repaint and redecorate their bedrooms, all I got for a reply was “Why?” I prefer to credit this to their easygoing-ness rather than slobbery, and I happily go along with it.

Speaking of paint, fancy paint finishes were trendy in the early 2000s. Remember? I am purplewallterrible at pretty things and never attempted the trend myself but the last person to decorate my rec room and my all-purple-walls-all-the-time bathroom mastered this highly textured technique. It’s dated now, but I’m not sure how to remove and redo it. So I haven’t.

 

 

 

This is the undone renovation I notice most often: the staggering anticlimax which is a twelve-foot chain suspended from a vaulted dining room ceiling which, after all that tension, ends in…a simple pendantlamppendant lamp. Maybe that’s what bugs me most about it—the chain and its lamp are bad storytelling, right there in my front room.

For lighting in the kitchen, we still have a sunshine ceiling—1990s shorthand for fluorescent tubes and smooth plastic panels.  Two of my sisters bought houses of the same vintage as mine and their sunshine ceilings were the first things to go. We all had equally bad feelings about them but I got distracted, didn’t act on my feelings soon enough, and now—the moment has passed.

 

The moment has passed for all the brass trim in the basement too, for the “bone” sunshineceilcoloured special-order 5-plex light switch plate by the front door, for the rattly aluminum blind in the living room with its dimming rod held in place by a paper clip. I’ve settled into all of it now. The chain-and-pendant lamp is still in some danger, but the rest of it—no one cares, not even me.

 

I suppose this means we did it. In three years we have truly made a new life for ourselves. Looks like it’s done not by making everything perfect and different and new, but by making new priorities, letting go of things that might have been important once, to people we used to be, getting comfortable with the baggage those people left when they turned into something new. Maybe “settled” isn’t the right word for it. Or maybe I don’t even care about that anymore. Simply put, some of our priorities have shifted to make room for things we never would have dreamed would become important to us. It’s a metric of change and—I hope—of growth.

I’m Back — or, Someone Like Me

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We — my family of seven — have moved to a new house in a new city. Though the physical act of moving is over we’re still not quite ourselves. Frankly, we never will be. We’re different now. I’ve moved enough to believe that, in time, these new differences will be mostly for the best. And I know “for the best” hardly ever means pleasant or easy.

One comfort I have as I and six other pieces of me venture into the more-than-ordinarily unknown every day is the house we have to come back to. Unlike all the other houses we’ve owned, this one was home to another family before us. They built it to suit their fancies and lived here for twenty-four years. Naturally, it’s a bit quirky — a bit haunted.

Here are some highlights.

Cold Storage!

Cold storage to delay all kinds of decay

This is the cold storage room which, as my father who was raised in a converted former funeral parlor explained to me when I was 4 years old, is the best place in the house to keep a dead person. It’s also got a rack for properly storing fur coats — at last.

Secret office space behind the furnace

Ultra-private office space behind the furnace

Behind the furnace is the secret inner office. I’m not sure who used to work here but he was probably very easily distracted. No windows, lots of white noise, total privacy. No, I’m not using it as my office. I work in the laundry room, like a normal person.

Laundry Office

I’m at the laundry room (What?), I’m at the office (What?), I’m at the combination laundry room and office

Honestly, I’m just happy to be working sitting in a chair instead of leaning against the headboard of my bed, typing on a tea tray.

The wrong wood

The wrong wood

This is what let us buy the house at the price we probably would have paid if it was truly haunted. Everything here is finished in a light, strongly grained oak. In 1990, it was right on. In 2014, it is wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s so wrong the sellers’ (very bad) realtor offered a cash-back incentive to help new buyers rip it all out. We opted for a reduced price instead and will be keeping all the lovely once-living material a hardwood tree was sacrificed to provide. I like it fine and even if I didn’t, it’d be sick and tragic to waste it.

Pin oak leaf

Pin oak leaf

There’s more oak outside in the form of a still-living tree. It’s fertilized by the carcass of a dead dog lovingly buried at its base. What was the name of that grody Stephen King book? About the cemetery, with the pets?

Unstained cedar doesn't look like much but it smells amazing

Unstained cedar doesn’t look like much but it smells amazing

Also outdoors is the virgin cedar deck. It’s never been stained or varnished and when it’s warm the whole backyard smells like a fancy new hope chest. Smell-writer loves it.

Sturgeon (yes, we know he's a goldfish)

Sturgeon is not a sturgeon

Formerly from outside is Sturgeon. He’s the sole survivor of the backyard pond. When a freak snow storm hit the first week of September, the boys couldn’t bear to leave him outside. Yes, we realize he is not a sturgeon but a goldfish (and we also realize a snow storm in September in Alberta is actually not freakish).

Her de facto name is "It's That Spider Again"

Her de facto name is “It’s-That-Spider-Again”

Here’s another new, accidental pet. This big, skinny spider has been hanging around watching the kids play video games in the basement ever since we got here. She commands too much respect for anyone to want to kill her and she refuses to step onto a sheet of paper so we can turn her loose in the outside world.

portal

The Portal

This might be our favourite thing about the new house. It’s a magic portal in the kitchen floor that sucks up dirt from an ordinary broom and hurls our filth into the void. It might be old technology to better housekeepers but I remain astounded by it.

rock

Sometimes a rock is just a rock

When my dear barely-older-than-me brother — my childhood animus — came to help us unload the moving truck, he said this towering rock in the front yard was the only thing he envied. Let’s not psychoanalyse this any further.

Tabula rasa

Tabula rasa

And last of all the quirky and darling things I could include in the tour of the house that has consumed all my time, energy, and money for the last month, here’s a 17 foot tall neutral-coloured wall I have no idea how to decorate. Leave suggestions in the comments, I beg you.

With that, here’s to clean slates and new beginnings and all things desperately optimistic.

Final Post Before Moving House: On Depression and Sadness

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My house from the creek-bed below it.

My house from the creek-bed below it.

With less than a week before my family moves house — leaving the town we’ve lived in for eight years, longer than I’ve lived anywhere, ever in my entire life – I’m feeling kind of depressed. I love this place.  I love my friends here. I love my kids’ friends. I love the atom football team. I love the trees we raised from saplings. It makes sense to be sad about a departure from a happy hometown. As one of the characters in my novel says, “I’d be more worried about my state of mind if something like this failed to upset me.”

So this is not a confession of an artist speaking frankly about her troubled mental health. That artist is real but I am not her. While I’m definitely feeling depressed today, it’s not the same thing as having the disease of depression.

When it comes to mental health, I’ve got nothing to complain about. It’s not because I’m smarter or better than people who do have valid complaints. I think it might be little more than an endowment from my mother –an ability to shout or cry away bad feelings before they settle in for torturous long-term engagements.

Even so, I do get sad. Over my lifespan, I’ve probably lost months-worth of sleep to grief and worry. My personal best record for uninterrupted crying exceeds three hours. One summer, my daily routine included standing alone in my garage painting boards for the epic fence we were building, quietly weeping over them.

None of this was depression. It wasn’t an illness. It was a reaction to well-defined, acute stress and tragedy. It’s like the difference between bruising for a few days after bashing a knee on something and bruising maybe until death because there’s something fundamental missing from the blood that keeps it from clotting.

With the recent death of a famous entertainer, a lot has been said about depression as a dangerous disease. All of that needs to be said. Depression is still far too stigmatizing. I have a close friend who suffered depression after each of her kids was born. She still worries someone will find the medical records of her diagnosis and medication and use the information as prejudice. “All your history of depression really shows,” another friend explained to her, “is that you were smart enough to go get treated for it.” She’s got nothing to be ashamed of and much to be commended for.

While not everyone suffers from depression as a chronic debilitating illness, everyone (except maybe, I don’t know, people with anti-social personality disorders) feels sad sometimes. Sadness is part of the human condition. It’s inevitable and normal. There is nothing strange or sickly about the sadness most of us encounter.

Here, in the middle of my move, I was talking with another friend who suffers from depression. She saw my mood was low and jumped to recommend treatments she uses when she feels herself falling – when her disease flares up. But I don’t have her disease. I don’t need to fight sadness as quickly or as fiercely as she does. I thanked her anyway. And above my pangs of healthy-person-guilt I was surprised to hear myself telling her I don’t mind letting myself experience a bit of my own sadness. It hurts but it doesn’t damage me. There’s value in it. I can trust I’ll survive it. My preferred treatments are patience and time, love and companionship, faith, music, food someone else has cooked, fresh air, and new things I discover every time circumstances demand my character adapt and change.

For people with severe depression, sadness can be, very literally, the end of the world. They need to fight it with heavy medical and social artillery and no one should fault them for it.

For the rest of us, sadness, deep at its core, is a horrible, putrid, unwanted gift. It’s okay to unwrap it and handle it. And no one should fault us for that – trying to convince us we’re deluded or unhealthy or callous when we take our sadness into our own hands to see what we can learn from it.

Sadness is part of our life stories. Its gift to us is our stories.