My House
Grey-white brick, green eaves and doors, a massive maple canopy above the front yard, the porch hiding behind a barbed and tangled hedge.
The backyard is thickly bordered by Pine, Oak, and Ash, with two forty-foot Norway Maples shading the patio.
Street-friendly, the lines smooth and warm, this handsome structure, diffident and proud, righteously proclaims its noble sixty-seven-year history.
A lighthouse, a beacon, an invitation with open arms to family and friends, it is an extension of me and I of it, as we nourish each other in a symbiosis of shared survival.
This is my house.
I’ve lived here since I was six years and three months old. My Mother was still alive. She was to bear two more children before she passed away in March of 1967.
When my father died in 1991, he left the house to my three siblings and me. I used my one-quarter share as a down payment, secured a mortgage, bought out my brother and sisters’ shares, and I’ve been living here happily ever since, with no regrets.
It was built in 1959, in what was known at that time as Toronto Township. Exactly where I won’t say, other than it was near the Credit River.
It was difficult, just by looking, to judge the official size of the lot. The first summer there, Dad, with our encouragement, rolled sod right to the edge of the stream that flowed behind nine of the houses on our street. It added approximately 700 square feet of borrowed real estate to our property.
About that stream: During the winter, it became a half-kilometre-long skating rink.
At night, with the neighbours supplying lighting, the trees covered in snow, and fifteen or twenty people skating, it looked like a scene from A Charlie Brown Christmas.
My brother Pat and I loved the woods but were wary of some peril. This suburban forest had the aroma of Eden with a whiff of danger.
Our next-door neighbour spoke of abandoned wells that hadn’t been safely filled in and of dangerous irrigation ponds. Allegedly, there had already been the loss of some neighbourhood dogs who had slid into one of these ponds and were unable to climb out due to its steep, slippery sides.
According to the prevailing community mythos, the woods and orchards on the east side of the development were littered with those perilous traps. In the seven years I lived beside these forests (they were all ripped up to build more houses in 1967), I found just one well and one irrigation pond. The well was filled with junk, and though I wouldn’t want to fall in there, it didn’t look all that lethal. The pond was definitely a hazard for dogs, but with one glance, I could see a couple of ways to slosh my way out if I fell in.
But that myth provided the dissonance and the danger needed to sustain the fairy-tale magic of our enchanted forest.
On the west side of the development was the Credit River Valley. A different world altogether.
I didn’t dare go down into that valley for the first four years. I had a friend who lived right beside one of the main paths that led there. He and I would travel to the edge of the ravine (about three hundred meters), but no further until I was ten.
It was a spooky place. From where that path entered the valley and then southwest to Dundas Street, there had been a lake.
Construction began on a dam in 1902 and, after some setbacks, was completed by 1910. This was one of the many independent hydroelectric projects that were doomed to fail once Niagara was online. Lake Erindale drained when the dam was blown up in 1941.
The river was polluted, and the valley was used as a landfill right up until the mid-sixties. It was an aggressive little river, its widest point being only about twenty-five meters, but it had hazardous rapids and a fetid odor. In fact, the whole valley had a rotting, moldy smell combined with a strong hint of sewage.
After an ambitious clean-up during the late sixties and seventies, the river once again spawned Salmon, and the valley became a beautiful park.
When we moved into Toronto Township, a municipality of almost 293 square kilometres, it was already developing into a bedroom community for its sprawling namesake next door, but its agrarian roots were still showing. (The name was changed to the awkwardly sibilant Mississauga in 1967).
Fruit trees, mostly apples, thrived in the sandy soil left over from the shoreline of Lake Iroquois, a larger version of Lake Ontario that had been shrinking since the end of the last ice age.
Walking northeast for five minutes from my backyard, there was a secret orchard of Macintosh apple trees with a forested windbreak on all sides. It hadn’t been tended since the developers purchased the land just a few years previously.
A pine tree at the back of my neighbour’s lot was climbable to about ten or twelve metres. From that height, I had a bird’s eye view (I remember it vividly) of the neat rows of trees and that same idyllic stream gently winding down from the east, bending south at my family’s property.
The trees weren’t dead. Far from it. The apples were edible and delicious if you heeded some crucial information. Learned through personal experience, these lessons will never be forgotten.
— Wait until the fruit is red. Green apples cause awkward digestive chaos.
— To avoid a mouthful of yuck, look for worm holes before taking that first bite.
In 1974, I went on the road. For seven years, prior to joining Gordon Lightfoot’s band, I played cities and towns in Canada from sea to sea to sea (Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic). I would be away for months at a time. In some ways, the house became more of a mail drop than a residence. Even after I reached the concert hall level, I was still away some years for more than a hundred days a year. My family and house were my anchors. In a world of constant chaotic change, I had two things that stayed constant.
I’ve had people ask me point-blank why I never moved out. The common idea was that if you were fortunate enough to become financially stable at a young age, you should buy a house and start building equity. After a few years, you use that equity to purchase a more expensive house, and do the same thing again after a while.
But what if you’re happy where you are?
One afternoon, a couple of months after my Father died, Gord Lightfoot came over for a “working” visit. We went over a few things and then sat down at my kitchen table for coffee. Not really comfortable with sensitive issues, he sort of sheepishly asked me what I planned on doing. I knew what he meant.
“I’m staying here,” I replied. “I’m reasonably close to the airport, I can still get downtown most days in half an hour, I’ve got the river valley to go running, and I really like this house. Besides, it’s way too much of a pain in the ass to move all my junk somewhere else.”
“That’s a good idea,” he said, “this is a nice, quiet street.”
Keep in mind that over the years, Gord kept moving to more and more expensive homes until by the time I met him, he was in Rosedale, an area of Toronto where only the wealthy could afford to live, and ten years later, he moved to an even more exclusive area known as The Bridle Path. Here’s what he discovered: Rich people love to renovate. Affluent areas are construction zones. He was going nuts trying to write music while the nail guns and jack hammers were creating acoustic hell…. in some cases right next door.
My street is not without its own challenges. Loud leaf blowers (all year round, not just in the fall …. go figure), some busy-bodies that report even trivial bylaw infractions, motorcycles and trucks with mufflers that don’t muffle, and cars that consider the speed limit to be merely a suggestion.
But it’s where my place is on this strange planet, and as I said earlier, I’ve got too much stuff to move. Overall, there are still way more pros to this place than cons.
However, I guess the real reason I won’t leave my house is that I would sorely miss it.
I’m staying.