The Hearth of the Matter

Our furnace is on the fritz. This is terribly bad news when one is regularly waking up to temperatures of -15 or -18. That’s centigrade, but it is still MINUS FIFTEEN. Or MINUS EIGHTEEN. We have two different furnace repair guys telling us two different things: 1) it can be repaired! Just get a new widget! Or 2) it can’t be repaired! Get a new furnace! Each repair guy has his own backer amongst our Board of Advisors. We have no idea who is right and who wrong. We just know it gets mighty cold with no heat. We’ve got electric space heaters plugged in, we keep the stove burner turned on in the kitchen, and the furnace goes on sometimes, but it’s not good. Not good at all. Whose bright idea was it to build a city here, anyway? A country? Have people not wondered why 90% of the Canadian population snuggles right up against the US border? I’m back to my fantasies that the War of 1812 turned out otherwise, and that the Eastern Seaboard today belongs to Canada, right down to Key West. That’s probably treason coming from an American citizen, but I’m a very cold American citizen. Just think: universal health care, decent schools, and subtropical climate. Heaven.

Winter Games

On television from Toronto we watched the Olympics in Sochi, where top skiers, skaters, snow-boarders, and bobsledders competed in temperatures that were downright balmy compared with the brutal frost-biting we’re experiencing here. The cold weather is record-breaking, apparently. ‘Worst winter since Noah built the Ark’ read the headlines (or something like that). It’s a very strange season. Every place we have lived as a family has suffered this winter: drenching rains and disastrous floods in England, drought (then floods) in California, and here an ice storm followed by loads of snow and thirty-one ‘severe cold weather alerts’. Normally there are five or six, I believe (but am not checking). And winter’s not over. I’m guessing we’ll hit forty. There’s just something biblical about all of this.

I’ve always enjoyed watching the Winter Olympics, and usually take up ice-skating every four years as a result. Not this winter. I own my own ice skates (which still surprises me) but have had no wish to don them and head for the nearest outdoor rink. Too darn cold. I’ve skied once this season, and the younger children (plus the dog) have gone sledding multiple times, but the allure of winter sports has diminished considerably. ‘Embrace the winter,’ we were told when we moved to Canada, and I’ve tried, but it’s tough, more like wrestling than hugging this year. An American friend who recently became a Canadian citizen tells me that to pass the citizenship exam I will need to prove that my entire family has skates and hockey gear (does that include the dog? Must check), that husband and I regularly get up before 7 a.m. on weekends to take children to hockey practice (we will have to take someone else's children), and that we expend a set proportion of our annual income on beer (do we have to drink it, too?). I hope she is jesting, but then again, recalling that my Cambridge-educated, England born and bred husband had to spend a full day taking an English proficiency exam it’s just possible that R. is speaking the plain truth.

On the subject of friends, another one of mine, Jennifer Berdahl, has performed an interesting analysis of Olympic medals won at Sochi per country in comparison with the countries’ gender equality scores. While it might not be surprising that countries more committed to upholding women’s rights and opportunities have more women winning medals, the interesting thing is that those countries’ men also win more medals. Check it out: http://jberdahl.blogspot.ca/. I am hoping she repeats the analysis for the Summer Olympics medal-winners.

House-warming

Finally, we managed to throw a house-warming party... six months after we moved into the house. Oh well. It was a blast, and a wonderful reminder of how many friendships we've built in the few years since we arrived in Toronto. It's a cold city with a warm heart.

I learned something new (just to remind us we're not locals yet). When you give a party in winter here, you have to think seriously about how to store the coats and boots. Ideally not like this:

And I learned that a large number of people own almost identical black Bogs. One child went home with the boots of another (sounds like a game on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue) and it has taken some serious detective work to sort it out. Where's Sherlock Holmes when you need him?

So. Much. Snow.

I've been doing a lot of walking lately. One day last week I calculated that simply going through my normal daily routine, I covered almost 10 kilometres. That's a lot. I'm used to riding my bike, but the quantity of snow and ice have grounded me. My bike fortunately has a cosy, covered corner in which to sit out the winter, but others are not so lucky:

In England, especially in Durham, I became expert at navigating on foot the narrow pavements (or sidewalks-- see Lynne Murphy's wonderful blog on transatlantic differences in the English language: http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.ca/). These paths were constructed, many of them, in a pre-industrial age. It was hard work, perhaps not quite as difficult as the building of the pyramids, but certainly no picnic (and a lot colder and wetter than toiling in ancient Egypt). Workers thus made things only as big as they absolutely had to be, unless they were constructing, say, a cathedral (http://www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/), which allowed a century or two's leeway for completion, was funded with pots donors' money, and had God's glory to satisfy.

My good friend K, the one whose home I shared until she gave me away to my current husband, taught me the art of navigating the thin paths that bordered cobble-stoned streets, so treacherous for the ankles. Durham is, for most of the year, full of university students who are thoroughly absorbed in themselves and to whom we oldsters (their teachers) were pretty much invisible unless we were stood at the front of a classroom (and even then, sometimes...). But K brooked absolutely no nonsense. I remember a particular instance when she and I hurried along the North Bailey, outside St. John's College, so close to the stone walls of the students' rooms that we could have reached in to nab a can of lager from the bedside table had their windows been open. Less than an arm's length separated the buildings from the cobbled road. K and I walked next to each other until three female undergraduates hove into view, when I stepped behind K politely to make room. The three girls chattered and giggled, unaware, crowding together, taking up the full width of the pavement, gormless, expecting, if they expected anything, that we would magically vanish, or at least get out of their way by stepping into the street. But no. K came to a full stop in front of them. They stopped too, surprised, and suddenly quiet. 'Well?' K enquired, severe and yet at the same time civil, a quintessentially English demeanour. The three blushed, mumbled, and formed an untidy single file that allowed them to pass us. Boys were a different story; as long as they were not (too) intoxicated, they instinctively seemed able to make room around them for others. I attribute it to years of team sports.

I acquired further skills traversing inadequate paths, rocky roads, and unexpected stairways when I began propelling first a pushchair (stroller), and then a double pushchair. There was a terrible moment at the top of some steep, unavoidable stairs by the Kingsgate Bridge, me eight months pregnant with one baby, a sleeping toddler in the buggy, and late to pick up the eldest from school. A boy student came to my rescue and I dissolved in tears of gratitude. (Ever since, I always offer to help people with strollers, however suspicious I may seem.)

All of this experience navigating difficult terrain is proving extremely helpful in the current endlessly snowy conditions here in Toronto. Our formerly wide-enough North American sidewalks have shrunk drastically from all the piles and drifts. We thread our way along narrow trails between frosty white hummocks. Stairs down into the subway that seemed perfectly manageable are now slick with ice and gritty with salt. My training on the mean cobbled streets of the Durham peninsula is serving me well. Holding my own when confronted by oncoming pairs and triplets of oblivious Canadian students requires just as much firmness as on the inadequate paths of northern England.

I have not yet perfected K's glare, though.

A Thank-You Note

Canadians are famous for being nice. I loved a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting Canadian lemmings at the edge of a cliff: 'After you!' 'No, after you.' Today, I lost my beloved iPhone on a TTC (Toronto Transit Corporation) subway train. It took me some time to notice its absence (love is blind), but within minutes-- seconds, actually-- of knowing that it was gone, I also learned that it was safe. A kind passenger on the train had handed the phone in to the ticket collector at the Lawrence West station, far beyond my home. The ticket collector said to me, 'I've been waiting for you to call!' and assured me he would keep the phone safe until I arrived. I sorted out the kids, headed back to the subway, and half an hour later, phone and I were reunited. Not only that, but the ticket man also handed me a pair of black woolly gloves. Those, I gave back.

I have lost belongings in England, too, and had them returned. But not often, and not usually intact. and never in a big city. So here I offer heartfelt thanks to my fellow Torontonian(s). May your journeys always be smooth.

The Birthday Party

Here and there, or then and now?

We started throwing children's parties way too early, in spite of good advice to the contrary. (Next time around I'll know better.) For instance, we combined our eldest's first birthday with a big house-warming party, in Durham. I still remember my regret at having baked - and iced- chocolate cupcakes for the myriad toddlers who turned up. Our newly-painted walls! The still-unstained upholstery! 'Look what a lovely day it is!' I said brightly. 'How about if you eat them outside on the lawn?' We had to rouse our sleeping tot, who had been awake half the night with a cold and (it turned out) incipient conjunctivitis, in order to sing him 'Happy Birthday' and to petrify him with a house full of people. The fear on his face, and the feeling of his tiny fists clinging to my jumper, haunt me still. It was almost 15 years ago.

Birthday parties in England, particularly in the north of England, have, or perhaps had, a particular grammar to them. They lasted about two hours. Disciplined mothers made sure no more than ten guests came, in which case they could host the party in their own home. Husband and I almost never managed that trick, because we usually invited two dozen children and then expansively included their siblings, parents, grandparents, and visiting third cousins twice removed, so most years we went to the next level: hiring a church hall or a leisure-centre gym, along with a bouncy castle and soft play equipment, or perhaps going the 'entertainer' route, paying a large sum to some entrepreneur dressed as a magician or a fairy or a clown.

When I was a child, birthday parties involved cake, ice cream, and perhaps a lollipop as a prize for winning 'Pin the Tail on the Donkey'. In contrast, at the parties I learned to give for my own small children, parents typically provided a meal of crustless white bread sandwiches filled with butter and jam, or Marmite, or processed ham, or cheese. There would also be an array of biscuits, usually including chocolate fingers and Jammy Dodgers (in Britain, the cookies all have names, and everyone recognizes them, like dear friends); there would be crisps of various types, also well-known: Hula Hoops, Quavers, Pom Bears; for dessert, fairy cakes and jelly. The home-made, perfectly decorated birthday cake would be brought forth, the child sung to, and then the cake whisked away to be carved, the pieces wrapped in paper serviettes and squashed into party bags already full of sweets and plastic trinkets. (Eating the cake generally involved consuming a lot of the napkin, too.)

After one attempt to match this menu, staying awake until 4:00 a.m. cutting up wilted bread, I became a maverick, foregoing the manufacture of fiddly sandwiches and serving instead ready-made 'pancakes', savoury biscuits, cold cuts and individual wrapped cheeses. I discovered that Costco made absolutely marvellous cakes, decorated to order. Radically I included mandarins, carrots, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, grapes and berries. I wasn't a complete ogre; I also made sure to have plenty of cookies and fairy cakes and crisps. No child was ever forced to eat anything in the least health-giving. Sure enough, there were always lots of fruit and veg left but at least the table looked cheery.

Here, in Toronto, and now, in 2014, it is easier for me. Perhaps it is Canada, perhaps it is the age of my children, perhaps I have just worn out. (Also, with older kids the parents don't stick around for the event so no one is watching what you serve. And the guest numbers drop dramatically when extended family stays home.) My youngest child's birthday happened last week and the 15 pre-teen girls who populated our house for the duration of the party (angels all!) were sustained with pizza, potato chips, and Cracker Jacks. They ate candy that they 'hunted' with flashlights in the park across the street (hidden by the eldest brother, the selfsame child I had terrified at his own first birthday party). I bought a cake, and served out the slices on the spot. Again, I offered carrots, cucumbers, and grapes. Again, there were quite a few left over. But not all.

The bar feels much lower here and/or now. Thank goodness.

Landed

We are now permanent residents of Canada! (Though 'permanent' means 'for 5 years' here.) On one of the bitterest, snowiest and blowiest days we have experienced, we drove to Buffalo, ate a late lunch of hot wings, and returned to the border. Hearts pounding, we stated our intent: to consummate our status as permanent residents. Overlooked by the Canadian flag and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, we did just that. We were prepared to be grilled about our worthiness and shaken down for proof of financial solvency, but it turned out to be a simple, straightforward process conducted by a couple of smiling young men we might have mistaken for Boy Scouts (except for the handguns in holsters at their hips). They had us sign our names, told us we could keep the pen as a souvenir, and then helped us find out about traffic (bad), road conditions (icy) and nearby hotels (available). So, abandoning plans to brave the QEW motorway home to Toronto, we are sitting, the five of us, in a Hilton Garden lounge on the edge of Niagara-on-the-Lake, sipping tea and reading the newspapers before a gas fire. Our celebration.

Toronto's woes

‘May you live in interesting times,’ goes the old Chinese curse. If so, my new city is definitely accursed. Last month in the New York Times, Stephen Marche wrote: ‘Toronto is starting to get interesting. It is a city making a spectacle of itself’. It is indeed. I felt I ought to say something about it. I can't bury my head in the sand forever. Especially when the sand is covered in snow.

In my humble and relatively uninformed opinion, the main problem is less Rob Ford himself and more that the city is constructed in such a way that he could be elected. He is almost entirely unsuited to his job. You could maybe elect him in Mayberry RFD, and make sure Andy Griffith was on hand as sheriff (anyone under 40 and not from the US may be puzzled; here’s a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HSZ8xJoCIg) and Ford would not be much of a handicap; any buffoon would do. In fact, for sitcom purposes, a buffoon is better. But when a mayor has in his purview the quality of life of millions of people, their commutes, their cityscape, their cycling and walking safety, and their access to libraries, arts, and affordable housing, and when the police have their own agenda, look out. This particular mayor is a human wrecking ball. (I’m not referring to his weight or size. I don’t care about that and I have no patience for bringing the topic into the debate. His weight is not my business and his size does not affect his ability, or lack thereof, to do his job.) Received wisdom says Ford was elected by the poorer, less educated suburbs as a lesson to the wealthier, cultured 'inner city'. (I find this in itself odd; when- and where- I was growing up, 'inner city' went with 'poor' and 'uneducated', while 'suburbs' implied middle-class privilege. How did that change?)

I met Rob Ford briefly a few months ago, while chaperoning a school trip to City Hall. I shook his hand, as did the children I escorted. I'm slightly horrified now, thinking what those hands have been up to, but at the same time I have occasionally caught myself thinking 'poor Rob Ford'. I still believe he is unfit to be mayor; he is both a boor and, most likely, a criminal. But I’ve met him, shaken his hand, watched him smile at my group of children. It’s the power of the personal. I can pity him: he is human, if you cut him he will bleed.

Which, on further reflection, makes me sad, not for Toronto (well, not just for Toronto), but for myself. While I feel very enmeshed in my neighbourhood and my community, and extremely attached to my new friends, I also have many old friends, really good ones, that I see too rarely. If 5 minutes of being face-to-face with Rob Ford can evoke my pity, how much I am missing by my remoteness from the very many people I hold dear? It’s an insoluble problem I return to, with sadness, every so often. The people I love are scattered everywhere, places I've lived, places they've moved; to get them all together and near me would involve kidnapping and other illegal activities. (I'm thinking something like a forced relocation program.)

My mantra: I can be homesick wherever I am.

Which makes me very excited to learn that one of my dearest friends and her daughter will be coming to Toronto soon for a visit! Can't wait. I didn't even have to threaten them. Much.

Keeping time

The other night, climbing into our cold car, I huffed and watched the mist trail of breath. ‘I’m a dragon!’ I called to the kids in the back seat. ‘Look!’

‘Mom,’ chided the eldest. ‘That was funny when we were five. Not now.’

‘Teens,’ I groused to husband.

‘Hey, I’m not a teen!’ said the youngest, who is at the tail end of ten. ‘I’m still a kid. Treasure me! Treasure me!’

We all laughed.

But my heart is breaking a little, too. In raising children, as I remind myself when I feel impatient with mine, the days are long but the years are short.

To be truthful, I usually remember that aphorism just after I've been impatient with them.

Sigh. I do treasure them, tot and teen-- beyond all measure.

Ice storm!

A reminder to us that we live in Canada: winter is only a day old and already its depredations are taking their toll. Either ice fell during the night, or rain did and then the temperature dropped below freezing, but we are now living in a world of icicles. It's a bit like spelunking without the cave, with light, and only stalactites. Okay, then, not so similar. But there is a sense of enclosure, of being cut off from the normal world, of being inside even outside. An ice-covered branch came down next door to us leaving a possibly live power line draped over a fence. The fire department appeared immediately to apply a web of crime-scene tape, like a band-aid. They wouldn't touch the wire and said that Toronto Hydro (confusingly, the electric company) would be along when other, more urgent issues had been resolved. 'Stay home,' urged the friendly fireman as he drove off over a length of the tape held down by his mates; they had trapped their truck inside the web.

Several friends report being without power at home (and have been urged to come camp out with us). We are fine at the moment, but when the next bough breaks, it could start getting mighty cold here. I suggested to dear husband that 'repair fireplace' should move to the top place on our to-do list for the house.

A little beauty: our front lawn in fall

That is, in autumn.

I am still a little amazed that we have a front lawn.

What we need now, clearly, is a rake.

PR

Hallelujah. We've been approved for permanent residency. We still have to cross the border and come back in to 'activate' our status ('flagpoling', the lawyer called it),but supposedly all the hard work is done and we have been accepted by the Canadian immigration authority. We're all set, until it's time to apply for citizenship, or to renew our PR status. In Canadian immigration law, 'permanent' doesn't actually mean permanent, apparently.

This is really great news. I know that. I'm happy and relieved.

It's just that along with buying a house, and having that recent unsettling sense of feeling settled, it is hitting home that Toronto is, in fact, home.

Guess we had better get our hearth fixed. We'll need it.

Leaves

A friend told me yesterday that she might move to British Columbia. 'Oh,' I sighed. I will be sad for her to leave here but I would stop no one from heading to the west coast. Sunsets! Ocean! Mountains. We joked about my going along with her.

Perversely, though, I then heard myself arguing for the benefits of living in Toronto. At this moment, I want to stay here, on my sofa, my dog on my feet, looking out my bedroom window. Lyrics run through my head: it's a gift to be simple, it's a gift to be free; it's a gift to come down where we ought to be.

It may be that I'm settling in.

Darn it.

If only there could also be the ocean and mountains and sunset...

Coming clean

My cousin, an accomplished psychologist, writer, and blogger (http://goodenoughmothering.com/) asked me recently how I managed to find time for blogging along with all my other activities, which recently have included planning a bar mitzvah as well as moving, working, school volunteering, and permanent residency application along with the daily routines of parenting and householding. It does start to sound like a lot when I list it, especially as my natural tendencies are toward sloth and hedonism, so the question has resonated with me - how do I do it?- and I keep wondering about the answer. Here's my attempt.

Firstly, it's a better question to ask of my sister, who is the ultimate 'I don't know how she does it' woman. I don't accomplish anywhere near what she does in a day or week or month. But I have decided that what I do manage, I probably owe to two factors: 1) having a wonderful, supportive, contributing husband who has a hand in at least half of the household and parenting tasks and (confession time) 2) my being a truly terrible housekeeper. Most women say it, but for me it's the god's own truth. I do very little cleaning and the bare minimum of laundry. For instance I have no idea where our iron is, or if we have an ironing board. (When the kids were little they thought the iron was strictly for the funny plastic mosaic craft called, in England, 'Hama Beads'.) We have a cleaner once or twice a month and pretty good immune systems. I shop, and cook, and usually get food on the table before the kids' bedtimes, and we collectively feed and walk the pets. Our houseplants don't fare well because they are quiet in the face of neglect; kids and animals have the virtue of making a great big noisy fuss when they need nourishment, which goes a long way toward their survival.

But thank you, Elaine, for asking. Let me brag that I have just finished sweeping three flights of stairs, though I will admit it's because I'm procrastinating work on my contribution to a big grant application due this week. I couldn't find the broom or the brush or the mop, so had to improvise with a duster and disinfectant wipes.

Down the rabbit hole without a passport

Trying to stay for any time in a country that is not your own is a pain in the proverbial. Immigration services worldwide seem to pride themselves on being distrustful,suspicious, and convoluted. My own country, judging by what I hear from my foreign friends, is the leader of the pack in pickiness and penalty, but fortunately for me I only deal with them at the actual border. I've had to negotiate with Indonesia and with the UK to be allowed to live, work, and study, and while my memories of encounters there are not fond ones, they are at least well in the past. (Like childbirth, you forget.) In Indonesia once I sat in a waiting room at an immigration centre hoping to renew my visa. Next to me was a man from Zimbabwe, or perhaps it was New Zealand, who hoped to run a shrimp farm on the southern coast of Java. His problem was that the work visa required ten fingerprints, and he was missing one finger, so having been rejected on that score, he was here to argue his case. I never did find out what happened to him. When it was my turn to enter the supervisor's office to be interviewed, the only question he asked me before stamping my documents was 'Are you a virgin?'

They haven't asked me that one in Canada in our quest for permanent residency (PR, as we hopefuls call it). The university provides us with the services of a law firm because the process is so complex, and we know we ought to be grateful for their help. The only trouble is that the appointed law firm seems bent on making things harder for us. The assistant with whom we deal cannot get my name right twice in a row, randomly calling me 'Mrs Husband's-Last-Name', 'Carlin', and 'Dr Leslie'. Very occasionally she calls me either Leslie or Dr Carlin and I do a double-take.

This would be funny in some contexts but not so much in legal or immigration ones. I had to make my way to the lawyer's office recently to sign a notarized affidavit, and found that, after months and months of sending this firm documents, information, and completed forms detailing intimate aspects of our life histories, they had got wrong my title, my address, and my citizenship. With an outward show of good humour I waited while they corrected and reprinted the letter. We proceeded with the signing and stamping, but at the same time I could not help clocking the opulence of the office in a high-rise, high-rent part of town, and thinking about where our tax dollars are going.

Then there was the medical exam we had to undergo (not just our family; all PR applicants). While I cannot say that the doctor, one of a small handful recognized by the province as certified to evaluate our health status, ran anything but the most upright operation, his policy was to accept payment only in cash. The office occupied a basement suite of rooms in a seedy building in the low-rent part of town. We were the only patients in the place; there are five of us, and he had exactly five chairs in the waiting room, so just as well. I had the impression that once we left the premises, the Venetian blinds on the glass door would snap shut, and the office would transform itself into a den of iniquity, for gambling, perhaps, or purveying illicit substances, or jazz. It would have been perfect for any of those, but it was not at all suited to the practice of medicine. As we handed over cash, nearly $200 per person, to the smiling receptionist I asked whether she was checking for unmarked bills. To her credit, she laughed. I don't think she was Canadian. As far as I can tell we passed the medical exam but on what data, I am uncertain.

We had to apply to a total of four countries in which we had lived as adults, requesting police clearance records. Three countries came up trumps (I now know where in our 'hood to go to get my fingerprints taken -- for the FBI, of course). The fourth country is Indonesia, where I lived many moons ago, and whose police will only conduct a record check if the request is accompanied by official government documents-- documents on flimsy tissuey paper that I have long since discarded, or lost. When I phoned the police department in the city where I lived to plead with them to make an exception, the officer listened to me politely, asked where I was calling from, and then, once he understood something of what I wanted, said 'Ibu- Madam- I cannot hear you' and disconnected. This happened three times. Nor could the consulates or private expatriate services assist. Eventually, merciful Ottawa granted me a waiver. It's warranted; I'm fairly sure that the only crimes I committed in Indonesia were sartorial. There was a lot of batik.

I don't believe in borders, by the way. I never have, but I always thought that was my own little peculiarity. Recently, and thanks to Twitter, I learned that I'm in good company, or at least company: http://openborders.info/

Busy-ness

I feel SO busy. But then, everyone's busy. Am I truly more harassed than others? It's so hard to judge. I'm definitely not one of those 'I don't know how she does it' women who seem willing and able to run the world; my tendency toward hedonism and slothfulness is too pronounced. But I definitely have trouble saying 'no.' Probably this is more from fear that I'll be left out of something than a desire to do good, but I volunteer for stuff and then find myself resentful. Recently I agreed to help at a charity yard sale, clarifying that my contribution would be packing up at the end (that way, I find, I'm less likely to be late). 'Oh thanks!' wrote the coordinator. 'We start at 11:00 am. Please come early and we will tell you where you're needed.'

No! I raged (to myself). I *can't* come early! I am too busy! But so is she, I answered me; clearly too busy fully to read my message. Oh yeah? I said. (Good thing no one else was around to interrupt this exchange.) Did that coordinator just move into a new-old house that keeps springing leaks? Is she trying to unpack hundreds of boxes that seem to increase rather than decrease in number? Is she in the midst of filing for permanent residency? Does she have three school-aged children and three pets to look after, and a husband who has left the country, albeit temporarily (or so he claims)? Is she hosting a bar mitzvah in three weeks including 40 out-of-town guests to whom she hopes to show effortless and generous hospitality on a shoestring budget? Does she have to give a research paper today at a hospital in... Oh hell. Gotta go.

High and dry(er)

So, moving to Canada seemed a good idea for many reasons, some large, some small. One of the seemingly less weighty was Big Laundry: the possibility of doing in one load the washing which in England would require three. This sounds trivial until you have a family of five and are responsible for everyone's clean clothes, all the time. The U of T rental house provided us large though old machines, and I got used to the efficiency-- albeit not to the dank and creepy back basement where they were situated.

Our new house came complete with a used but heavy-duty Maytag washing machine, the signature brand of Sears, itself a Norman Rockwell-like signifier of American tradition. Great. But no tumble dryer. So I shopped around and found one that seemed fine and could be ordered online; relatively cheap, basic, not too many settings and features-- Amana, another good old tried-and-true American brand. I checked the size; the machine was big, but would fit easily into its designated space. I negotiated well with the company (or so I thought) to get both a low price and free delivery. Clever me.

Alas, not so clever. Our new house is in fact quite old, dating from 1899, and the upstairs hallways are very narrow: ours had a bottleneck of 26.5". Lifting, twisting, turning, and shoving failed to get the dryer, whose narrowest dimension, depth, measured 28.5" with the back panel removed, beyond that point to its intended destination. Everyone, from the deliverers, to Jan the Man (who is in charge of coordinating and managing our inadvertently major overhaul of the new house), to husband, to an engineering friend, said 'Nope, it can't be done. Send it back. Get a smaller one.' But Big Laundry was part of the dream. Again, trivial, but not to me. I couldn't let go. After two weeks without laundry (and a lot of me saying 'Careful! Don't spill! You'll get that dirty!'), importuning friends, even contemplating an evening at the laundromat, I was ready to give in and Go Small. Then Jan said, 'Wait! We have a crazy idea.' Greg, an ex-gaffer who is one of Jan's band of merry minstrels, said he felt confident that they could wrap the dryer securely, haul it up the side of the house with ropes and a ladder, onto the roof of the extension (husband's study), up again and over the rail of the third-floor sundeck, then downstairs to the second floor and into the back room intended for laundry.

It sounded mad. It was mad. I asked whether they had insurance. They laughed. I worried about whether the dryer would survive. I also worried about accidental death, both out of sincere concern for the Merry Minstrels, and for our future lives in a home marred by tragedy. A friend to whom I described the plan said that the crime scene tape would be in the shape of a rectangle with two feet sticking out. Husband worried about damage to the roof of his study.

But they did it! And it all went swimmingly. Everyone lived. Up, over, and down in under half an hour, and later in the afternoon they had the dryer connected and running (though the washing machine had sprung a leak-- I think the gods are telling me to stop doing laundry). Jan and the minstrels are miracle workers. We will miss them when they go. Jordi the dog will be especially sad; he anticipates the men's arrival every morning, yapping with excitement when he hears them at the door: Adam, Adam, Ben, Chris, Greg and of course Jan, plus a few who come and go before I learn their names. It's sort of like our family has suddenly grown.

So, yes, it will be a bit lonely when they are done and gone. But I think we might get used to it (except for Jordi). In any case, we are ready to find out.

Discoveries

We are unpacking in a random, slightly desperate, frantic lack of order. Late last night, in the basement, we opened some of the boxes that had remained untouched since we left Brighton and others that had been packed up in Durham, almost a decade ago. Some had flies or bits of mouse poop caught under the wide strips of brown packing tape, like extinct insects in amber. We may re-discover evolution.

We did make some quite wonderful discoveries, like a 480-count pack of our favourite Sainsbury's Red Label tea bags, bought before we moved to Toronto. Frabjous day. Does it matter that the best-before date is 2011? Still hoping to uncover our big brown teapot. It's been so long that I wonder whether I just imagined owning it.

I found a birthday card to husband from the girlfriend before me.

The dryer has to be sent back. Our friend and expert, Karl, says it can't be shifted to the laundry room without removing many bits of the house. He did detach some of them, to our slight horror, and it was not enough to move the machine. Karl then obligingly returned the bits to their designated positions. Relief.

And to make life even more interesting, the washing machine seems to have caused a leak in the kitchen ceiling.

Will the fun never stop? Because really, I'm ready for some nice, soothing boredom.

On the plus side, my friend Hilary has come to visit from California (YAY!). Today she helped with kids and house. Tomorrow we are gonna have us some fun. Watch out, Toronto.

Moving experience

It was a long day. We sure do have a lot of boxes. Truly, a lot. It was like the Million Box March.

Movers arrived at the old house at 9:15 a.m. and dropped off their final load at the new one at 11:30 pm. It poured, poured, poured with rain. A thunderstorm hit around mid-day. The men left quite a few things behind, including numerous boxes in the basement; they couldn't be moved (said the movers) because their bottoms rotted, thanks no doubt to our several floods. At 2:00 a.m. husband and I were sorting through the collapsing cartons, like miners after gold in a particularly grotty cavern. At 4:00 we slept in our new house. For the next few days we went back and forth retrieving forgotten detritus.

We are still recovering. Temporary recuperation was at hand in the form of a visit to friends with a spectacular cottage in the area north of Toronto. To these friends we say 'thank you for our sanity'.

Now we are back home (home!) with all three children, and trying to live a normal life. Having no kitchen just makes it a bit more challenging. Oh, yes, and does anyone have any ideas for getting a dryer down a hallway that is one centimeter too narrow? Answers on a postcard please...

Compare and contrast

Packers moved through the house at a rate of knots, wielding rolls of tape and Sharpie markers. The three women were efficient, friendly and calm, asked me for no hot drinks, and completed in one eight-hour day (including a lunch break) what it took three cranky men four days and multiple cups of tea to accomplish when we left the UK. Admittedly a proportion of our belongings has remained boxed up and stored since then, but we've also acquired three years’ MORE stuff. How to explain the difference? Gender, nationality, personality? (I couldn't possibly comment.) As the women left, with smiles and good wishes for our new house, they said ‘the boys’ would arrive on Monday to finish off the last bits (the kettle, the toaster oven, the furniture) and do the actually moving. Maybe that will give us an extra, critical data point.

Our house décor is now Modern Box. Eldest child and I quite like the look, as do the cats, who leap from one tower to the next. It reminds me of the first few weeks of living in Toronto, while our possessions were still on the high seas heading west. We wonder: do we really need all this chazzerai? Now, as then, we seem to be coping fine without it, although it must be said we have been subsisting on a raw-food diet other than when kind friends invite us round for a proper meal.

Thank you, kind friends in Toronto. And not just for the dinners.

Holes

Our new house looks like a colander.

Sixteen days until we are meant to move in.

Moving on. Part 2.

Where was I? Oh yes, the bully bid.

We had no idea if this mad idea (the one to buy a house that we had fallen in love with but seemed unlikely to be able to afford) would go anywhere, so we returned to our round of viewings, buzzing through another three or four houses that afternoon. A couple of them were quite nice, but our hearts weren't in it. And we never did get to see the one I’d originally spotted, which it turned out was already under offer, way WAY too expensive, and had no parking.

We said good-bye to Kate without having heard any news. We stopped for distraction at the pie shop before retrieving children from their various friends and tried not to think about the house. It was too unlikely. Then at 6:30 in the evening we heard from the sellers’ agent that yes, the owners would 'entertain' an offer! Our hearts leaped. But there was a caveat: they were obliged to contact everyone else who had viewed the house and left their details. Fortunately for us, the house had only been on the market that one day, and the weather had been chill and drizzly, so there were not many names to be reached. Further, it was a Saturday evening, so anyone who didn’t already have financing might be stymied. (In fact, as it turned out later, we ourselves didn’t have quite the financial security we thought we did. As it turns out, it was enough, but the possibilities still give me nightmares.) The agent commented in a by-the-way manner that his one-month-old baby (his first) was ill in hospital so there might be a little delay in responding to messages. That put the deal in perspective.

The roller-coaster ride began to get more exciting.

Kate joined us at our dining table and we all began to read the home inspection (72 pages—we didn’t have enough printer ink so we read directly from the screen) and then to construct an offer. What would constitute ‘worth their while’? How much could we throw at this? We calculated percentages, conjured with kabbala, read tea leaves, and signed our initials in the red circles Kate stamped on the forms. We tried to reach our mortgage man; he ignored our calls but answered Kate’s phone at 7 pm and said okay to our proposed offer. A few days later we found out to our horror that he was talking through his hat and that we actually had no guarantee of approval. But, confidently ignorant on that Saturday evening, we filled in the spaces after the dollar sign as if we had the blessing of a major bank, Kate took the paperwork off to wherever it is that offers go, we served two of the kids a hodge-podge dinner, and then I headed across town (again) to collect the eldest child from a birthday party. I was given several other party guests who needed delivering to their respective parents, and began weaving generally homeward, taking northern and eastern forays for the drop-offs. My phone rang and my son answered it. ‘It’s Dad,’ he reported. ‘He says to come right home. You need to improve your offer.’

Good grief. I pulled over and tried to understand; apparently, we were bidding against one other competitor, and if we could offer something convincing, the house might, just might, be ours. Unbelievable that we had gotten this far; I tried not to look too much further into the face of hope. It might blind me. For the time being all I could do was disconnect and hurry home, but hurrying is not easy, or wise, on a Saturday night in Toronto. After a somewhat dubious stop that required depositing two brothers on one street corner and watching them walk across the intersection to be swept into a taxi by a woman they had assured me was their mother, we got home. ‘Shoo,’ I told the children. ‘Go watch something.’


Husband was brewing tea. He, Kate and I looked for an ‘improvement’ that we might make. I asked about the unwell baby; no news, but Kate said she would find out. More money was needed; again, we called Mr. Mortgage, and again, he said ‘sure, go for it’. More red circles, more initials; I suggested that we make the offer amount end with the digits of the house’s address to try and make some sort of personal connection. We wanted that house. Not just any house. This one, tonight, felt already like our own and tears came to my eyes as I thought of someone else living there. I imagine that adopting a child is similar-- though of course much more profound-- in the stage before the paperwork is all done.

In fact this was an example of real estate recapitulating romance and the building of a family. We had already fallen in love with the house. Now Kate (the midwife?), raced off across town with her delivery, to the Place Where Offerings Are Made (Mount Moriah, perhaps). We had stipulated that our offer, this one, with our initials in half a dozen red stamped circles across the multiple pages, expired at 12:30 am. It was now 11:00 p.m. We sent our neglected (actual) offspring to bed and sat down to pretend to work and read. Now we felt echoes of the birth of our second child, with whom we went to the hospital a few hours too early and sat around watching a movie starring Debbie Reynolds and Rock Hudson as we waited for my labour to progress (and then progress it did, with a rapid bump and the precipitate arrival of an adorable baby boy, and we never saw the end of the film—we’ve always wondered what happened, but don’t recall the title). We looked at the online listing of the house, clicking through the photo gallery, wondering why none of the rooms looked familiar. We had a slight panic – are we making an offer on the right house? —and then recognized a bedroom with framed posters of anatomical drawings that we recalled from our brief tour. Relief. But really it was crazy; we had been in the house for no more than 30 minutes. I’ve spent longer choosing a pair of shoes.

Tick, tick, tick. Midnight. Twelve-fifteen. At 12:29 a text from Kate: ‘they are still deciding’. I flipped blindly through an issue of Bon Appetit; husband looked at his computer screen. The phone rang at 12:31 and we answered on speaker. ‘So,’ Kate enquired, ‘have you thought about which bedroom will belong to which child?’

O Joy! Jubilation! We couldn’t believe it. Shock, awe, laughter, tears, muffled so as not to wake the kids. Husband and I looked at the pictures on the screen again, then harnessed up the dog, left the children sleeping, and walked the five minutes to the house- our house (-to-be) just to look at it and reassure ourselves it was there. Our new arrival.

Of course, there was the afterbirth, the messy part about making a deposit and negotiating the mortgage. And it turned out this baby needed more than the average amount of postnatal care, because the mortgage was not in fact as fully formed as we had been led to believe. For several weeks after we had committed ourselves legally to buying the house, we were on tenterhooks waiting for the bank to grant us mortgage approval, something we believed we already had. ....[REDACTED AT HUSBAND'S REQUEST. I AM A SURRENDERED WIFE.].... Eventually, though, a manageable mortgage came through, as did one from another company, and we had the luxury of choosing the better deal. For a few weeks, though, I tried to imagine what life in prison might be like. I wondered whether it might be a productive place for reading and writing. Who would look after the kids? Could husband and I take turns serving our sentences? At this point, house-buying came to resemble those early days of infancy, with little sleep, unpredictable feeding times, and labile emotions. The phone would ring and anything might be happening on the other end.

But to keep a long story from getting too much longer, in this instalment anyway, we got our mortgage and our lawyer and all our papers signed and abracadabra, we own a tiny little piece of Toronto. (At least, our bank owns it.) In a few more weeks, we hope to move in.

Already I feel more as though I belong.

The poorly baby, the son of the sellers' agent, recovered and was absolutely fine.

____________________________________________________________

I looked out the window by my desk for quite a while. That man, the one with the little girl, came out of the Athletic Centre, walked to his silver Voyager, jumped in, and drove away, smiling at someone on the pavement. He didn’t get a parking ticket. Lucky duck.

Coda: ripples into tsunamis

Of course, following my friend's advice about dropping pebbles into ponds is part of how we ended up moving here. When husband was offered the opportunity to be considered for his current job at the University of Toronto, he asked me for my opinion. I said 'Sure, why not? Hey, maybe you'll get a free trip to Canada out of it!' As it turned out, that was no pebble. It was a boulder.

Not about the house: pebbles and ripples

A very good friend of mine is a successful, smart, somewhat scary academic. She has a dream job now, one which she richly deserves, but before getting there she kissed a lot of employment frogs, so to speak. She did this from the vantage of someone who had a perfectly good post in a well-respected university. I used to wonder why she bothered accepting requests to apply for and then turn up at interviews for positions she had little intention of filling, sometimes traversing vast distances at inconvenient times to do so. 'Because,' she told me once, 'a lot can happen when you agree to an interview. I've met people and collaborated with them on some of my most rewarding projects. I've found opportunities for my students. It's like dropping a pebble into a pond; you don't know where the ripples will go.' (Probably physicists will tell me that they can in fact tell where the ripples will go but that would be missing the point.)

A few nights ago another friend, visiting from Durham, where we lived when my children were born (gee, I love writing that: 'where my children were born'. I have children! I bore them! It still amazes me) brought two of her own children to stay with us. When I met these little girls 15 years ago, they were aged 3 years and 1 year. At that time my eldest son was 2 months old, tiny, fragile, adorable, and endlessly precious. I had great difficulty feeding him. (Now he is muscular, sturdy, handsome and still endlessly precious. The only difficulty feeding him is in keeping the fridge stocked.) We were all attending a first birthday party, a party that constituted my launch into the social life of parenting, and set the bar for how I would be a mother.

Magazine articles and child-rearing guides always commiserate with new moms about the isolation they experience becoming parents. I was lucky to live in a small, friendly university town as a new mother, but not many of my academic friends had tiny babies. When my son was only a few weeks old and I was home on maternity leave, I decided to attend one of the mother and baby groups advertised in the local paper, where for the admission price of two pounds, I was offered a seat on a minuscule chair and given a lukewarm cup of tea. I perched there dumbly for a time cuddling my son; I might even have hidden away at one point to shed a few tears over my nursing troubles. But then I was approached by an amazing, dynamic and sociable woman, pregnant and with a toddler of her own, who greeted me, asked for my life story and then my telephone number. I gave them to her, surprised and pathetically willing. She listened, smiled, and left me to chase after her little girl. Finally the children and their mothers gathered in a circle, clapped to 'If You're Happy and You Know It', donned coats (it was May, in the north of England) and said good-byes. I struggled home in the rain with a crying baby and no dinner planned, feeling rather silly. What had been the point of taking a 5-week old infant to a playgroup? He didn’t care about seeing other children, or having a biscuit and a cup of juice. But a day or two later the friendly woman called, asked me to her house, and made me part of her group. The party invitation followed. I met the friend with the two daughters, and her friend, and hers. We gathered regularly. We compiled a cookbook. These friends commissioned a song to be written and recorded for me, about me, for my fortieth birthday, the most creative birthday present I've received since my father quit smoking when I turned twelve.

So, it was a pebble. And this week, watching the two chattering teenagers set off on public transport to survey the lights of Toronto from atop a 550 meter tower thousands of miles away from northern England, I felt a tidal wave of love and wonder rush over me. So this is how life works. Pebbles make ripples. Our children grow up. We move around the globe-- the Pebble Woman now lives in Switzerland-- but we don't have to grow apart.

Moving on. Part 1.

Date: 23 April 2013

Something just happened as I looked out my window. It wasn't the thing that was supposed to happen, which was receiving inspiration about how to pull together my presentation abstract, due tomorrow. Instead, I watched a father park his silver Plymouth Voyager and help his little daughter out of the car, on the street side, right into the bike lane (only a dad...). I held my breath, but all was okay; he was watching carefully. A good dad. Oops, they forgot something. He opened the car's front passenger door and retrieved a water bottle, which he handed to the child. She smiled up at him and they trotted into the University Athletic Centre, the sequins on her purple trainers flashing in the low sunlight. They're late for her swimming class. Or maybe it's dance, or track and field. Not gymnastics; that entrance is around the corner. The man hasn't bought a pay-and-display parking ticket, so clearly he feels lucky. Very lucky. His chances are not good.

I knew all that. I've made the same dash, from right across the street, with my own children. I've been looking out this self-same window for almost three years, and I feel I am part of the view. I look down into open sunroofs (a black Volvo station-wagon) on to the tops of busses (good old number 94, always early or late, never on time, plying the currents of Harbord Street). In the winter, even now in the 'sprinter' (spring resembling winter), the trees bear only thin dark boughs, no leaves to block my sight. But the tips have buds. Spring will come.

And I thought, suddenly, 'I love this city.' And then a split second later, the shock hit. Whose words were those?

We did fall in love though, 10 days ago, with a little bit of the city. It was with a house. After a month of dogged hunting, we walked into a house that felt, right away, like home. Our realtor, Kate, had commented many times in the preceding weeks about how 'open-minded' husband and I were. That was a polite circumlocution for 'lacking discrimination', we knew. But in fact, almost every house she picked out for us to view had some redeeming, appealing feature, usually more than one. Maybe it was a crappy building but in a lovely little cul-de-sac of a street, with a little library box at the end.





(It turns out that this is a whole movement, the Little Free Library thing. Get yours here: http://www.littlefreelibrary.org/index.html)

But after viewing 24 houses, some more than once, many of them utter wrecks that would take months or years of work, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and bucketloads of imagination to put in tolerable order-- and others so polished and grand we feared our tattered furniture and selves would degrade them unforgivably. We made tentative offers on a couple of houses, one of which we actually liked a lot. The way it works here, offers are binding contracts in themselves, made with documents in triplicate, signatures, drops of blood, etc. There's no willy-nilly of England: 'oh, yes,' I'd say over the phone to some seller's estate agent, 'tell them we could offer £350,000,' before ringing some other agent and putting out a tentacle in a different direction. No, in Canada, or at least Toronto, once an offer is accepted, earnest money immediately follows and any breach of agreement is treated seriously indeed. So although you might see two lovely houses in a week, if they have the same offer date-- and generally these seem to be on Tuesdays-- you don't dare make an offer on both or you could end up having promised to buy both (worst case, but still). But still, just because we had made offers on the previous two Tuesdays, we did not *have* to go through it again on the next Tuesday. Only if we found a house we really wanted to live in.

Then one grim and rainy Saturday we set off with the hero of the piece, Kate the Realtor, to see another batch of houses, starting with one we had seen a few days earlier and after a few days away from it, had convinced ourselves it was really rather appealing. Back we trekked to 'Little Italy' into a wonky structure with missing floorboards and odor of rodent, trying hard to believe we could make it our family home. 'When is the offer date?' husband inquired of Kate.

The selling agent told Kate that he had received a couple of 'bully bids' already, so the offer date wasn't really relevant. 'What? What's a bully bid?' we asked, innocently, unaware that within a very few hours we ourselves would not just understand the strategy, but deploy it to wondrous effect. First though we had our list of viewings. Next up: a tiny little treehouse in Regal Heights. What a nice name for a neighbourhood; it even included a vague upward slope. We loved the street but the house, although listed as four-bedroom, was really only big enough to house The Borrowers. It was one of the very few houses we saw that we were able to reject out of hand.

‘Kate,’ I asked, as we left. ‘There’s a house for sale on Brunswick. I have seen the for-sale sign a couple of times. Probably there’s some reason it’s not on our list but perhaps you could check?’ Oblingingly, she did so; nodded into her phone a few times, disconnected and said, ‘Actually that one sounds like a possible. Their agent will be there for another half-hour so if we go right now we can see it. Meet you there!’

‘Okay,’ we agreed, though this would mean criss-crossing town again in order to see the others on our list. ‘See you at Brunswick and Lowther.’

‘What? No, at Brunswick and College.’ She paused with her hand on the car door.

‘Really? That’s not the one I asked about.’ I was dubious.

‘Well, never mind; the agent is waiting for us now. Let’s go have a look.’

So off we headed, with no high hopes, since this wasn’t the house I’d spotted, almost feeling irritated at the extra driving on such a chill, wet day. When we found the house, I was surprised; it was on a lovely block, around the corner from our rental home, and in fact I had cycled down the street only two days earlier en route to middle child’s school. There had been no ‘for sale’ sign then, just an unbroken row of graceful semi-detached homes with lawns and a wide grass verge. A true avenue.

‘No,’ the agent agreed. ‘It’s only just gone on the market.’ We walked in and all three of us thought, ‘What a great house!’ This was the one we had been seeking. Tattered and shabby round the edges, certainly no show home, but not a wreck either; proper Victorian (for husband), a double garage (for me), lots of rooms, four bathrooms, a sundeck with a view over downtown and a west-facing front porch and a little park across the street and a set of back stairs. We knew as we wandered through it that we could never afford it; it was much bigger and more desirable than the house we’d lost out on the week before. I admired it, and loved it, and mourned its loss all in the 15 minutes we explored it. I kept running to the front windows to check on the car, which was illegally parked across the road. This felt like our house, but we knew we couldn’t have it.

‘Kate,’ I whispered, ‘Would you want to go in on it with us?’ I was formulating a plan.

She laughed. ‘I’d love to! Unfortunately it’s not ethical.’ Oh well.

On the way out, Kate asked the young, smiling seller’s agent about the offer date. He named a day almost two weeks away. ‘Why so long?’ Kate inquired.

‘The owners are going away; they won’t be back until then,’ he explained. Kate persisted. ‘When are they leaving?’ Tomorrow, as it turned out. Husband and I sighed again, and shrugged. After 10 more days on the market, everyone and his brother would have seen the house and entered a bid; we would absolutely not be able to compete. Someone else was going to get our house. But Kate wasn’t done.

‘Would the owners consider an offer tonight?’ She held the other agent’s eyes. ‘Tell them we’ll make it worth their while.’ Husband and I exchanged glances. What was going on?

‘I’ll ask them,’ the young man agreed. ‘I can let you know in the next couple of hours.’

‘Fine,’ Kate said, handing him another card. ‘We look forward to hearing from you.’

She pulled us outside. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘Let’s throw everything we can at this one. You want it, don’t you? If you do, we have to get it before it goes to open bidding.’

A bully bid! We were making our own bully bid!

To be continued.