11

The Layers Revealed

We are still on the wood-chip wallpaper. We have discovered more of it, on the hall ceiling of all places, and scraping it from an awkward angle ramps up our annoyance levels. The Husband offers to take the bullet on this one. He is taller, so he can reach it easier. Plus, he is a gentleman. Still, there is no mistaking a touch of self-flagellation in his offer, that scraping wood chip off the ceiling will be penance for buying this dump in the first place.

As for me, I am warming to the house. I do not totally love it—maybe I will not ever totally love it—but I have a morbid fascination of seeing where this renovation takes the house, where it takes me, and us as a couple.

Removing the wood-chip wallpaper does not faze me. There is a hypnotic quality to the work that gets into my pores and cells. With scraper in hand, I dig gently but firmly at a corner and use the smallest of actions to wedge under an edge until there is enough of the paper to allow it to be torn from the wall. As I home in on one stubborn section, my focus becomes concentrated, like narrowing one’s gaze on a pinhead. Scrape, scrape. The rhythmic action, the intense shortened field of vision deliver me into a contemplative trance. Soon, the scraping is nothing but white noise, and my mind is tumbling down the rabbit hole, straining for the sounds of my past.

With one exception, all my previous homes permitted me to have my way with them, to do what alterations needed to be done so that I could settle into them. This Bristol house is different. Each morning when The Husband and I leave Little Britain and drive toward it, I do not approach the prospect with the excitement of previous renovations but with a cautiousness, a preparation of mind. Like going to church. It is a common house, nothing special. Its location, its architecture are, as they say in this country, bog standard. But for some reason this ordinary house seems determined to draw me into a level of self-reflection that I was not expecting, nor had wanted. It has taken me in hand and led me to a scraper and a bucket of warm water, apparently believing that this is all I need to direct my mind to the past, consider the present, and to glean from this exercise patterns, symmetry, and insight. My guide is not the grumbling old man I sensed on our first visit to this house; I think he was just the caretaker, a squatter. I think he got fed up and left. This other manifestation is benign and definitely more task oriented in terms of getting me to meditate on why home—and by extension, moving—has been so dominant a force in my life. This house is a spirit teacher.

HOW DO HOMES LAST SO LONG? Bricks are essentially sand, clay, and water; stone is nothing but sediments of sand, minerals, and water. Furthermore, when we look upon a home, why do we categorize it as an old home or a modern home? Are not all homes ancient? Are they not all built from sand sifted up from some long-vanished lake or ocean, and of stone hacked from the vast strata of bedrock that comprises the earth? Whether the sand or stone comes from the crags of Scotland, the Apennines of Italy, the Picos in Spain, the Canadian Shield in North America, or the Andes in Peru, our homes are birthed from a geological lineage millions of years old. Even the sharp-squared brick of a newly built home is fired from the earth’s prehistoric quarry of sand, soil, and lime. All our homes and buildings are literally as old as the hills.

How is the rubric of stacking stone or brick determined to ensure the durability and stability of a home? And what is it in that conglomeration of hard materials that go into building a home—of brick, concrete, stucco, stone, wood, plaster, glass, steel, aluminum, PVC pipes, and copper wiring—that makes the whole ultimately soft to us, one that so readily absorbs our emotions and memories and fears?

When a marriage breaks down, does the marital home suffer, too? It is one thing for houses to resist centuries of battering by Mother Nature, but what of the blunt forces of human nature? How do houses withstand the reverberation of anger, or of inconsolable grief, within their walls? How do they withhold secrets and pain without cracking, or absorb extreme joy without their windows shattering in their frames?

What is it about the homes of other people that makes us swoon with desire? That makes you want to pull up a chair, stare, and luxuriate in the surroundings and imagine that the home belongs to you? With some homes you are happy to leave, and the sooner the better. Some do not try hard enough to evoke comfort. Then there are the ones that try too hard, exuding the perfumed and surgically enhanced glamour of a superannuated movie star.

A third type of home enchants at an almost cellular level. You want to take in every inch of it—the arrangement of knick-knacks on bookshelves; the sight of a row of herbs on a windowsill; the interplay of light and shadow; the choice of colours and furnishings; a passageway leading into the garden. I confess to being mesmerized this way when visiting or seeing images of Spanish, Italian, and Moroccan homes. Is there an alchemical formula at work in the homes to which we are attracted? Is it 20 percent nostalgia, 30 percent colour, 10 percent furnishings, 15 percent botanicals and plants, 25 percent lighting (natural and electrical)? Surely the formula is different for everyone. In the same way that a meal tastes better when someone else cooks it—their specific ingredients? the convivial nature of the conversation? the surroundings?—some houses look, feel, and smell better than our own. Is it a case of the other person’s grass being always greener? Perhaps it says something about our lack of confidence in putting together a home, or about our general state of discontentedness.

I THINK I HAVE FINALLY HIT peak move, peak renovation. This particular renovation feels more like a clear-out of the cerebral attic. I cannot say I am loving it, nor am I loving this trip down multiple memory lanes. The past can be a painful companion. Then again, the chance to piece together fragments and to make peace with others does bring solace, if only to understand the why behind all these moves.

There are moments when I can barely face this reality of how many times I have moved in my life, and I find myself, as now, staring into space and counting them off on my fingers to maintain a mental log of the upheaval. Here it goes:

As a newborn, I was brought home from the hospital to a wartime bungalow on Craigmore Crescent in Willowdale; then we moved to the split-level Bauhaus design on Larkfield Drive in Don Mills. Next it was to the old Henry Farm house, which was surrounded by modern new homes but lacked a completed junior school; in the six years we lived in that house I ended up attending six different schools. After that we moved to Mason Boulevard—another two schools. Blissfully, I remained at Lawrence Park Collegiate for the rest of high school. Ah, stability. After graduation I was off to Carleton University in Ottawa, and spent three years there in four different off-campus houses. Each summer, I moved back home to Toronto: it was always eight months at school in Ottawa and four months in Toronto, then packing up and moving back to Ottawa for eight months, then back to Toronto. Six moves right there. When I returned home at the end of university, my parents were by then living in a farmhouse in Milton. The commute from Milton to my summer job in downtown Toronto was onerous (it was long before the days of GO Transit), so I got an apartment on Maitland Street in downtown Toronto. Three months later, I was offered a job in Woodstock, Ontario, and so I packed up and moved into a flat on Huron Street. A year later, I was back in Toronto with a new job and a new apartment on Isabella Street. Marriage followed three years later, and with it a move to another apartment, this one on Balmoral Avenue. We bought a house a year later and moved to Romark Mews in Mississauga; two years later we moved to Gloucester Avenue in Oakville. We had a child, and eighteen months later another child, so we moved to a larger house on Kingsmead Crescent in another part of Oakville. Then my marriage broke down, and I moved out and into an apartment a few blocks away. Four months later, I moved back to the marital home. The marriage ended, and I packed up and moved to Woodbine Crescent in Hamilton. Three years later, I married my second husband, and we bought a house on Hyde Park Avenue. When that marriage failed, I moved to Stanley Avenue. Three years and three different jobs later, I moved to Pelee Island for five months, sold my house in Hamilton, and then moved into my mother’s home on Lawson Street in Oakville. When I found a home of my own on Elmer Avenue in Toronto, I moved with the kids there. But that did not last long, because I got laid off from my job. Eight months later, we moved back to Hamilton and onto Herkimer Street. I lived on Herkimer for seven years—a record!—and then downsized to a condo on James Street South. Then it was marriage number three, and I moved to England—first to Howard Road in Walthamstow, London, then King Street in Brixham, then into our rental in Longwell Green, and finally into our home in Bristol.

Well, look at that. Couldn’t even contain them on a single page. So how many moves is that? Thirty-two homes and eight schools, not counting university. It is no surprise that sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, cocooned in darkness, with a surge of panic racing through me: Where am I again? The confusion clears once I realize that I am home.

All this moving and renovating once made me worry that I was becoming my mother. Not anymore. Bolted horse. Barn door. I have made peace with the fact that much of my mother’s restlessness resides in me, and no matter how much I rail about never wanting to become that person who moves constantly, that is who I am. I also recognize that rape trauma is a factor in my inner agitation. I recognize now, in a way I was unable to do before, how and where my compulsion to move kicked into high gear after my rape. The rape occurred when my then husband and I had just moved into a new home. Within the year, I was dropping hints that it was time to move again. When I became single again, I thought moving house was a way to push away the stigma of divorce, but the reality was that moving house created a level of agitation that would psychologically garble the rape memory enough to send it spiralling into a corner of my brain, never to show its shameful face again.

Years later, I continue to play out the residue of the trauma, one house at a time. Those two components—the rape, and my mother’s influence and behaviour—are behind my desire to move: one is the fuel, the other is the driver, though their roles interchange from time to time, and I am never quite sure which is the driver and which is the fuel.

This new knowledge is a consolation. Better to know why you do what you do than simply that you do it. Recognition confers the frame of reference from which you can harness self-control. In the same way that reformed alcoholics continue to refer to themselves as alcoholics and pray for sobriety, I will continue to call myself a property nomad, and pray for stability.