Wordless(-ish) Wednesday

Oh yeah! So this is why I wanted to move to the new house:


I lied. There's gonna be words.

That's me, reading the Saturday Globe and Mail Style and Life section, and drinking a beer. I'm sitting on my new porch, shaded by a wall of ivy and screened in the front by cedars. Pynchon, taking the picture, is standing at about the halfway point of the porch; it extends across the whole front of our house, 22 feet of wood planks and gentle breezes. That's the baby monitor receiver on the table--Munchkin is napping. I've got my comfy Crocs on and I'm channeling my summer vibe.

It's amazing what a move of 500 feet north can bring: community and peace. All the surrounding houses have front porches, and traffic being so light, people are always sitting out there, enjoying themselves. My real estate agent strolls by daily with wife and dogs, and I move down to sit on the steps and chat. On my right, neighbour Donna and her husband are working on their garden, planting a bed of begonias--earlier, they called Munchkin over to see a butterfly. On my left, neighbour Marie has a little dog who will run up on the porch if she thinks there might be food. The little girls across the street, aged 4 and 6, call over to Munchkin and me: do we want to come and play in their yard? Sure! Directly across from us, Mike and Julie examine the masonry under their front window; Mike is nesting because Julie is having their first child in October. Her mom and she come and go, come and go, a steady stream of shopping bags into the house, and old doors and old toilets and old linoleum coming out.

The other night, I moved out on to the porch with my laptop after Munchkin went to bed. Marie and Mike and Julie were sitting on the latter's porch, laughing and chatting. I wandered across the street in my slippers and joined in: who is renovating what? the baby is a girl! is our dryer hooked up yet? It feels easy and comfortable. The street is filled with young couples and young children. Allison one door over suggests that in about ten years, the parents on the block are going to have to start staggering their vacations lest all the teens and tweens on the street start hosting big house parties. There are, though, plenty of older residents too: the activity around their houses and yards is less frenetic, their pace slower. Donna tells me that the previous owners of our house raised six children there in the 50s and 60s. Six kids!

All around us I see: children's toys, small foreign-made cars in narrow driveways, chalk drawings on the sidewalk, flower beds and the dappled shade of swaying trees. I hear: children's shrieks, birds chirping, adults laughing, the growl of a lawnmower, the shriek of a neighbour's saw, trimming boards for a new shed.

It's a storybook street: red brick and tall trees. White middle class professionals, married, with children. Property values and who's-doing-what, hiss of a beer bottle opening, roar of a barbecue. I can't believe this is me. And it's comfortable. I settle into this privilege like a birthright, entitled to a childhood like my own, of green and comfort, surrounded by people just like myself.

I haven't lived like this for years, not since my own childhood, really and it's at once comfortable and strange, this new person I'm becoming, or this self I'm returning to. But I like it so far: this orientation of interest outward, out toward the street and the neighbours rather than inward and private, toward a fenced yard. Maybe we're connecting into a community that already seems so privileged, so homogeneous ... but it feels like something important, this knowing everyone's names, a hello and friendly wave, some other mom's hand brushing hair from Munchkin's face even as I straigthen the wheel on an tricycle for some other mom's child.