I’m Going To Miss This House

by weathereye

We’ve lived here four years, and learned to love its odd charm. This is a Victory home, orphaned in a quasi-rural area away from its cousins, and loaded with efficient nooks and crannies, a nifty garage and the biggest back yard possible. It was never meant to be a permanent home, and as we prepare to move on (we get the keys to the new house tomorrow), I would like to look back at the good and the bad.

The bad:

  1. That driveway. A snowblower was fun for the first winter. Not so much fun the second. The third was no big deal, as we had no snow. The fourth? the snowblower died (I sold it on Kijiji by claiming it was a battleship anchor). I cleared the runway, sorry, driveway once by hand, and aged a decade in the process.
  2. That yard. “I don’t need a rider mower,” I said. “It’s a good workout.” And then I stuck to that sweaty motto for years, dealing with allergies and other health issues (known as Outashapitis) while steadfastly refusing to invest in a big riding mower.
  3. Those neighbours. They have always looked at us in our little house as the poor relations, sitting there in their big fancy homes across the road. One of them threw a dead skunk in my yard, and later let his recyclables blow into our ditch in a windstorm and never picked it up. He had his rider mower up for sale and, just to spite him, I said no.
  4. Well water. If the power goes out, as it does here all the time, we lose water. I can live without electricity (Lights, stove, TV, Internet, music), but not without water. Also, not without the Internet. I was making that part up.
  5. The hill. Have you ever tried to walk or bike to our house? It’s not easy. Sarah tried it once and we had to do CPR. The kids won’t even try. It takes me six minutes to bike downtown, and an hour to get home. “But it’s a good workout,” you say. I would then refer to you to No. 2.

The good:

  1. Privacy. Yeah, there are neighbours, but they’re across the road. Nobody lives beside us. This allows us to make kites out of 20×20 tarps and fly the kids around the yard whenever we want.
  2. The ’70s rec room. Honestly, if you’ve never been in my rec room, you’ve missed out. Astroturf, wood panelling … when I’m in it, I just want to watch the Partridge Family while having a fondue.
  3. Darkness. As a skywatcher, living in a place with no streetlights is a blessing. And as a burglar-basher, I have had plenty of opportunities to use the Big Dawg voice to scare away prowlers.
  4. Well water. When it works, it’s the best-tasting drinking water you’ll ever sample. Going back onto city water is not something about which I am excited. Nor is proper grammar, but I do it anyway.
  5. The wildlife. This is what I’ll miss the most. The curious fox, the circling hawk, those crows, the turkeys, the rabbits, the skunk, and even the raccoons who hang out in the garage … we are surrounded by nature here, and we’ll lose that. One time, the hawk was eating a dead skunk up in the back 40 and I thought it was a turkey doing some kind of breakdancing, so I walked up to it and was basically told to find my own skunk. Have you ever come face-to-face with a big hungry hawk? Not fun.

But life goes on. And so do we. I will miss this weird little house, but I’m also looking forward to something new. Also, once we’re in the new house, we can walk to Walmart. So there’s that.