Moved!

My move is done, just the aftermath to deal with. Everyone thinks the hard part is the packing and the actual moving. It's not. That's the easy... well, easier part. Taping together boxes and filling them is rote and mindless work, physically tiring and endless but it's just repetitive grunt work.  For the

Unpacking

move, we use a major moving company and they are great. They send two trucks, five guys and everyone is polite, respectful of our home and our stuff and know what they are doing. The moves usually go seamlessly as far as getting all our stuff from one place and into another.  It's all the rest of the moving details that make me crazy. Even the transfer of utilities is pretty painless now. I do as much online as a I can and we had our phone, internet, cable and utilities all set up the day after the move. Its the things you can't foresee that knock you sideways, as with life in general. And there are always things you can't foresee, even after as many moves as I have handled.

This move started with a mix up over keys. Due to issues with the rental agency we could only have one garage/elevator key fob. A bit of a problem when the fob is needed for everything and my husband and I had to be in two different places. I am still waiting for the extra fobs four days later. Then there was the leak. This is the second move we have had where a water leak was found on move in day, and leaks are problems, BIG problems, my friend. The previous leak required a refinishing of all the wood floors in the main floor of the home we had just moved into. All our furniture, carpets, artwork etc had to be moved out again for the floors to be redone. This time the leak is in the ceiling of our laundry room and will require the removal of drywall, etc, etc. It is starting to smell already. Welcome to your new home, Faye!

Ted having his non-Zen moment.

This is what a room full of paper looks
like when tamed.

Having boxes and packing paper delivered to your house is a breeze, one phone call and there they are. I also get used boxes off of Craigslist so they come into the house in small amounts. After a move there is a huge mound of flattened boxes to get rid of and enough crumpled packing paper to fill a room. Ted took on the most-dreaded job of flattening the paper and the boxes. The boxes were no challenge, a good knife, a few slits through the tape and a big space-gobbling box is flat against the wall. Very satisfying.  But the paper proved to be another thing altogether. I have friends who won't come near my house now until after the paper has been flattened. Everyone has been called in to help with it at one time or another and if you can get into the Zen moment of it the act can be relatively painless but if you don't it becomes the most disliked job in a move.  Ted rose to the challenge and smoothed out paper for hours but by the end he was ranting and raving, swearing to NEVER, EVER flatten a piece of moving paper again! Not too Zen. It's not rocket science but believe me, its a challenge. If you don't flatten it out you will be hauling garbage bags of crumpled paper out of your home for days.

Ted has left on a trip and I will be joining him in a couple of days. Till then I am, arranging for repairs, waiting for key fobs, slowly emptying boxes and stowing things away, all the while knowing I will most likely have to rearrange it all again. And maybe once more after that. No two houses have the same storage or closets and where you keep things is always going to be different. Moving is easy compared to settling in and making a home. And therein lies the most difficult part of the move, making someone else's home feel like yours. I'm pretty good at that part but it takes time. Check back with me in a couple of months and I'll let you know how its going but for now I'm still trying to find that damn wine opener!

Ted's office awaits him.

Home

I am out for a walk today in my neighbourhood in Vancouver.  It is a perfect fall day in the city, blue sky, fresh breeze, about 16 degrees. As I stride along the sidewalks, scuffing at the smashed chestnuts that have fallen from the huge trees I pass under, I can't help but think about the city I live in and how much I love it.

Crushed chestnuts on the sidewalk

People say all the time that Vancouver has changed so much, citing the traffic, the expense,  the influx of immigrants, the old buildings being torn down, the new buildings going up...the bike lanes. But on a day like today, walking between West 22nd Avenue where I live and Broadway so much feels the same. 

My sister and I moved to Vancouver when I was fresh out of high school and she had just graduated college. We both had jobs in the downtown core and it made sense to leave our hometown of Richmond behind. To our delight we found ourselves in an apartment in Kitsilano. It was love at first sight. The beach, the funky shops of West 4th Ave, the bars and restaurants. What more could a couple of young, single women want? 

Richmond is flat, and when we lived there many of the areas were newly built, the trees spindly and held up with stakes, the houses an assortment of the five different plans that the builder allowed. But in Vancouver.... the trees were huge, the houses  old and unique, streets undulated up and down giving onto fabulous views of the mountains and ocean, and the beaches were full of people like us. Heaven.

I left the city almost a dozen years later to raise a family and then moved back with my husband and grown kids seven years ago. It felt like coming home. Even though I had grown up in Richmond, spent twenty years in Tsawwassen, the years that I lived in Vancouver had imprinted itself on me. It was where I truly grew up. My father spent part of his childhood in the West End, selling papers on the street corners and my mother went to UBC almost seventy years ago. I feel like there is a little bit of my family DNA here.

Forty-two years after I first moved into Kitsilano I am walking its streets again.  Going to the same library at MacDonald and West 8th Ave. where I used to check out books, renewing my drivers license at the same Motor Vehicle branch where I received my very first driver's license.

The sidewalk stamp at 14th and Stephens

As I walk, I look for the date stamped into the sidewalk below me that tells me when it was laid. Some say 2010, or 1992 but many read 1929 or 1931. Vancouver is not an old city and despite the feeling of some that it has been wiped clean like a white board and replaced, small signs like this remind me that some of the early days still remain. The sun filters through the same huge maples, chestnuts and oak trees that have been dumping their boatloads of leaves on these streets for decades.

Big, old chestnut tree

 Many of the funky old homes have been discreetly turned into triplexes and quadruplexes but they still stand. Yes, quite a few homes have been replaced but the unattractive boxes from the fifties and the horrible "Vancouver specials" from the sixties that went are no great loss as far as I am concerned.  Many of the new homes in my neighbourhood are a vast improvement. And their picture perfect  gardens are a delight. 

Broadway now holds Vietnamese and Thai restaurants where Greek and Chinese ones used to stand but the feel is the same. Pizza shops, bakeries, produce stores and banks line the street just as they did forty years ago. Change is inevitable, everything and everyone is in a constant state of change, but that is not a bad thing. I've changed a bit and I'm happy to see that Vancouver has, too. There are new places to explore, different cuisines to taste, more cultures to learn about. These are all good things.  When I'm strolling along Spanish Banks looking at the North Shore mountains or walking around Kits Point to the planetarium these changes all feel so small. They are just the spice that makes the dish. 

Avenue of Stars
Original artwork by Jill Charuk

When I first moved to Kits it was full of joggers, brown rice and people smoking pot, now it's yoga, quinoa and people smoking weed. The more things change the more they stay the same. So I embrace my Vancouver like an old friend, she has a new haircut, she's put on a few pounds and speaks a second language but her heart still welcomes me home.