First Days (Or, Trial By Fire and Water)

The closer I got, the more excited, and the more I tried to stem that excitement with practicality. After all, I had bought a super old house online, without ever having seen it in person. There were bound to be surprises.

Passing Shelburne, I tried to note every building as I got within 30km of my house. This would be my immediate neighbourhood. I looked across the horizon for the sea, but it stayed hidden from me by the kilometres and kilometres of forest alongside the road. Expanses of evergreens, deciduous trees that had already lost their glorious fall colour and most of their leaves, and larches shining bright yellow green waved past me. I caught glimpses of rivers, flowing wild and black over rocks through openings in the forest. I breathed and I drove and finally turned onto my road. I tried to imprint my first impressions as I drove by every house, every barn. It was rural, this area. There was a lot of water. Rivers, ponds, lakes. The houses were all old East Coast style homes with clapboard and cedar shake sides, double hung windows and roof details. I passed the big church with the old cemetery, gravestones tilted against the wind, and the golf course, which didn't seem like it belonged here. I turned right at the Y and crossed the one lane bridge over the Clyde River. I could almost close my eyes and know where I was at this point, as I had looked at this final stretch of road on Google maps a million times. I felt like a child, bursting with wonder and awe at this unfamiliar world and the prospects of an unwritten future.

I remember feeling the same when I was 8 years old and my best friend, Elaine was taking me back to her house in Winnipeg with her family for a couple of weeks that summer, camping along the way. Her father had been on sabbatical for a year from the University of Manitoba. He moved the family to Brampton, Ontario, where Elaine and I ended up in the same Grade 3 class and became immediately inseparable. She and I would delight in being outside, and in going to the library and taking out stacks of books which we would then take back to her grandmother's house and read. When we finished our own stacks, we switched and read the other. Nancy Drew books were our favourite.

I was the kid who had never been in an outhouse, and never spent any time in the woods, other than down at Fletcher's Creek when I was growing up with my next door neighbour Jack, where we played pretend and caught crayfish under the stones in the water. One spring day, Jack and I were walking to school in the morning. We were both six years old, in Grade 1, and stopped at the corner of McMurchy and Elgin to wait for our friend Raymond. Raymond came out of his house and the three of us sat on the curb for a time. I pulled out my rice krispie square that I brought for recess, and pulled it apart into three pieces for us to share. Raymond took a bite of his when his mother yelled from their front porch, “Raymond, get to school!” So we got up and walked, but while Raymond continued on to school, Jack and I decided to head down to the creek instead.

We spent the day wandering up the creek and playing, stopping to eat our lunch when we got hungry. We made our way to where it ran behind the highschool. After playing there for a while, the kids from the highschool started streaming out the doors and heading home, so we figured it was time to head home too. When I walked into the front door of my house, my mom said, “You're home early.” I panicked and said, “The teacher let us go early.” She knew something was up, but it was Jack's parents, both teachers, that caught us in our lie. Before the afternoon was up, I was called over to Jack's house. We sat on the couch, side by side, while his parents gave us a good tongue-lashing about skipping school. I felt sorry for Jack having such strict parents, and felt so guilty for getting us both into trouble, but I could leave when the talk was over. He had to stay. I did not play hooky again until Grade 12.

On the morning Elaine's family was coming to get me to drive up and over the Great Lakes, camping at Lake Nipigon on the way in their popup tent trailer, I was so excited and nervous that I threw up. I was terrified my mom and dad wouldn't let me go because they might think I was sick. And I was nervous about going away for the first time, without the safety net of my family.

This feeling I had as I made my way closer to my new house wasn't exactly same, because I didn't throw up or feel nauseous, but my stomach was in my heart and my heart was in my throat, and I couldn't make a sound. It started snowing lightly as my house came into view and I pulled into the driveway. It looked like the pictures from the realtor's website. I walked the short distance to the front door, keyed in the code to retrieve my keys from the lockbox and opened the door.

I swear I held my breath as I walked through the whole house. I was here. This was MY house. This was where I was going to live and make a living, and stay for a long time. I was home. As I passed from room to room, I listened for disquiet in the energy of the house, but there was none. It was just quiet. I felt it was holding its breath like I was, and checking out my intentions as I poked into its corners. It was beautiful! It was big. It was cold. And so quiet. The thermometer read 50ºF. Thank God I brought the little space heater. I turned up the heat, but it didn't appear to do anything. The oil tank outside had a gauge on it that read, empty. I would need to order oil for the furnace and wood for the stove. For now, the only heat I had was the little space heater in the front room.

I wanted so much to wander around the property, but I had Kitten in the car and wanted to get him settled. I swept out and cleaned the smaller front room with all of the windows and the built in cabinets and window seat and unpacked the car. This would be my studio and where we would sleep for a while, while I worked on the living room. I brought Kitten into the room, closed the doors and let him out of his carrier. I set up the air mattress and made the bed, so glad I brought my bedding and duvet and didn't opt for the sleeping bag and pad I was originally going to bring to save space in the car. I took all of the bits and pieces out of the room that had been left behind, including wrapping paper and a bedcover, but I kept one 16”x 20” mounted photo of a white tiger face staring straight into the camera. Somehow in this big, old, empty house, shut into one small room, this tiger felt protective.

The water coming from the kitchen tap was a bit brownish, and so I let it run for a few minutes waiting for it to clear. It sort of cleared a bit, but still had that old water smell, so I filled my camp kettle and put it on the stove to boil, thankful that all of the elements worked. I had had the water tested so I knew it was fine to drink, but I didn't want to take any chances of getting sick.

I made tea and wandered again through the house, taking note of anything that would need fixing. It wasn't too dirty, other than accumulated dust in the corners from having been vacant for the last 9 or so months. There were bits and pieces of stuff left behind, but I was so thankful that the two big ugly sofas and the armchair in the real estate photos were gone at my request. The big wooden desk in the dining room that I asked them to leave, turned out to be not as nice as I thought it might be, with its plastic laminated top. Upstairs, the bathroom kind of scared me with its original fixtures, water damaged floor and clawfoot tub surrounded by blue shower curtains that, on one side were push-pinned to the wall. I turned on the taps, which all worked, but the toilet water was turned off. I half-prepared for a water disaster when I turned the water on and it started filling the massive tank. It flushed fine, but it leaked at the back, so I shut the water back off.

I found an extra closet, another built in cabinet and the pink bedroom at the back of the house, very pink and in not-so-great repair. The walls had all been deeply scratched, the ceiling had been only partially redone, and it appeared that someone was practicing their knife-throwing skills at the door that led to the back attic space. Mental note to ask neighbours what went on in here. The attic was full of stuff from previous tenants; records, bed frames, and an odd collection of dishes and bathroom paraphernalia. There were stairs that led down to a hallway. At one end, an unfinished room that appeared to be the woodshed. At the other end, the kitchen.

The kitchen was in rough shape, in that it was strangely configured, with no countertops and the stove beside the washer and dryer. There was a long butler's pantry with a big window that looked out onto the side yard. Plenty of cabinet space for everything I owned and more. The cupboards were full of dishes and I could see that I would just have to leave the kitchen as it was for a bit since it was going to require a good amount of time to tackle. I had two weeks before the moving truck arrived and had to make sure the living room and my studio were finished by then so that there would be a clean, finished space for all of my furniture and boxes.

It got dark out. I ate something for dinner in the small front room with Kitten who had crawled under the covers and would not come out. I poked once more into potentially scary closets and down into the basement with its hulking oil /hot water furnace, expecting to be creeped out...but nothing. The house was quiet. That night, I went to bed early, still holding my breath. I was prepared to be woken by strange noises. I was sure I would have a nightmare, but I didn't. I slept so well.

In the morning I left Kitten in the heated room and made myself camp coffee and oatmeal. I went outside, a beautiful, sunny morning, and sat somewhere between serenity and excitability as I still tried to wrap head around the truth that the house was mine and I was actually here. I poked around the property and walked straight back through a clearing to the river which was not on my property, but so easy to access. The river flowed, wide, fast and deep, as the tide was going out and the water rushed its way back to the ocean at the bottom of the watershed.

Back inside the house, I started right in on the living room, sweeping and shooing the families of daddy-long legs that had taken up residence. Whoever had lived there last had covered the walls of this neglected, tenanted-for-years house in textured, paintable wallpaper, painted badly with horrible colours. The living room was a light purple. Mauve. Even the name has bad taste. My studio was a garish yellow. As an artist, having lived in so many places, and being blessed with self-proclaimed good taste, I have seen a lot of questionable decorating jobs. This was one that told me that the people who had last lived here didn't care about their living surroundings. I was just happy that the wood hadn't been painted and that it was left in a state of disrepair rather than covering over everything in order to sell it.

Because this was MY house, and I didn't have to ask anyone if I could, I started tearing down the wallpaper, which came off, for the most part, in large sheets and unearthed more layers of wallpaper and paint underneath. The layers took me through the decades. Through the 80's, the 70's, 50's and 30's and back even farther still which led me to believe this house was built before 1926. I felt the house breathe, and the plaster fall behind the last layer of wallpaper. I realized that these areas of wall were only held together because of the layers and layers of wallpaper. So it became a strategic removal of the wallpaper as it was not in my budget at this point to start replacing walls. In fact, there was no budget other than the paint and drywall compound that I had brought. I uncovered areas that had been repaired so many times they were a collaged quilt of materials and colours. I worked for hours until my arms were so sore and the floor was covered with debris.

I have developed an ability to compartmentalize pain and unpleasantness. In a tense situation, I'm able to keep my head down and work at the task on hand. Running, or working on a physically demanding project, I can push past the need to stop and make it to the next light pole, the next corner, the next landmark, until I've reached my goal. When in pain, I concentrate on the area and tell myself that nothing is permanent. This will be over eventually. I had a feeling I was going to be using this skill/ coping mechanism/ endurance quite a lot in the weeks and months to come.

On the second day, I cleaned more of the house. I had heard that you shouldn't overwhelm the septic system if it hasn't been used in a while, so I tossed the bucket after bucket of dirty cleaning water outside while I did a couple of loads of laundry. Finally, I could wash the towels I had used for cleaning up the basement flood in Hamilton the day before I moved.

That evening, I had a good, hot shower in the big clawfoot tub upstairs. After my shower, I came downstairs to make tea and heard a small engine going. And going. And going. It didn't sound right. I traced the noise to the basement. It was the water pump that pulled the water from the well. It was beginning to get warm and wouldn't shut off. I Googled it, of course, and the instructions sounded to me like alien technology. Totally foreign. I had not a clue what to do. So I called my dear friend Peter, in a panic, because he lives off-grid, quite rustically and knows about these things. He finally directed me to the fusebox and told me to unscrew the fuse for the pump. Seriously, why didn't I think of that? Peter thought that maybe the pump was old and needed replacing. I hoped not. It was another expense I hadn't counted on.

Now, I was without heat and water. Staying in a small room in a big house. I was alone here, other than Kitten, and in quarantine, thousands of miles from family and friends. There was no landlord to call and say, “Hey, can you fix this?”. But somehow it was still ok. I still felt safe. I would call the real estate agent in the morning to ask her about it.

Next: Friends and Neighbours