April 4, 2008

Welcome!

Welcome to my kitchen and the entrance to our new home. After perhaps a total of nine hours scrubbing and unpacking, this is the first room to be wholly presentable. It was also the room that made me fall in love with the apartment, which I still love even though now I know about the leaky sink. It is beginning to feel like home here, though the move has left me exhausted and disconnected from my entire life. And I’m not sure why, the move having been easy as pie, our movers lovely, friendly, helpful and strong, and the new house being an ten minute drive from the old one. This place was filthy though, which might be part of it. Previously inhabited by dirt moreso than people, but it’s clean now. We’re home now. Clothes must be unpacked still, wall hangings mounted, odds and ends purchased, but we’re nearly there.

Our new neighbourhood is technically called Sussex-Ulster, though you could also locate it as south of the Annex. And it’s been made clear to me how defined are Toronto’s neighbourhoods: I’ve lived in a walkable distance to here for a lot of the past decade, know the neighbourhood well, my old neighbourhood still so close by, but I feel as though I’ve moved to a whole other world ripe for discovery. Though of course living somewhere is always a wholly different experience than just passing through, but it’s strange to be somewhere you’ve passed through so many times and have it feel like new. To have it almost feel like home.

I like my new house because it doesn’t shake in the wind, because the cat next door comes to visit, because we’ve received post every day we’ve been here, because there are so many book shelves that Stuart said in all seriousness that we needed to get more to fill them, because our downstairs neighbours appear to be human, because it’s so big, because I get to sleep in an attic, because the washing machine operates coin free, because the sun comes in and the breeze comes in, and because here it has always been spring.