Looking for home

[vaneramos]

I just returned from looking at two apartments and a townhouse within close walking distance of University of Guelph, partway down Gordon Street Hill. As a matter of fact, they're right across the street from Jon's apartment building, though of a different quality.

There is a certain feeling to places where students have lived continuously for decades. The walls may be freshly painted with that cold white. The tub may be thoroughly scrubbed. But underneath the veneer you feel a sense of transience, many lives passing through, bursting with hope and carelessness. The rooms wow down an angle like a room of mirrors. You can feel lives slipping away in different directions, looking at themselves, reconsidering a million questions. It feels like me, but I don't belong there. I would like my closet to have a door, not a series of pipes running up the back corner. The hardwood floors are scraped and scoured, then laid over with the dust of crumbling aspirations.

Honestly, I would rather be looking for a home in rural Queensland. But this is my present, here I am now.

I have lived in places like that before. 1 University for instance, the summer of 1985. Four young men in a three-bedroom apartment. The third bedroom was actually a refinished porch overlooking Gordon Street. We were all too poor for curtains, so Frank and Josh slept there with students walking past them while they snoozed in the morning.

I have lived in places I loved. Elmbrae, of course, with the endless meadows behind, but we won't discuss that today.

One of the most interesting homes I rented was the house in Paisley. It looked like an ancient bungalow of yellow brick with a strangely arched roof. No real access to the attic though. Behind it, past the bank with willows and sumac, ran the Saugeen River. Right there, out my kitchen window, it met the North Saugeen. Paisley bridge arched across. Freshwater salmon would come to spawn in the rapids, then their carcasses would rot.

Little goldeneye ducks would ride the stream like a roller coaster, then fly to the top and ride it again. I took a canoe trip down the Saugeen once, in May when the fast places were swollen and thundering white. Those ducks knew how to have fun. It was a bracing experience, learning just how and when to plunge the paddle, turning the canoe away from the upward arrow ripples signalling rocks. Knowing that a wrong move meant overturning, damaging the canoe or worse.

The strange thing about that house was what I didn't know until much later. I got married while living there; my wife joined me. One day she went to the Paisley library and looked through an old history book. There was a picture of our house from the 1890s, three stories tall, with terraced gardens running down to the river. The last daughter of that family had lived there until recently, but stricken by Alzheimer's. Her son removed the two upper floors of the house, too much space for her to get lost in.

I wish I were a sea turtle, born with my house on my back. I would know from the first moment what to do, scrambling through the layer of sand. I would know where to go, and I wouldn't balk at running the gantlet of gulls and crabs hungry for my soft flesh. I wouldn't even hesitate at the ravenous fish in the deep blue beyond. I would just know what to do, and I would go.

I received a call back from the landlord of a two-storey house in our price range. It's on Liverpool. The search continues.