LA CASA LOCA

 

  LA CASA LOCA

by

Adrian Truss

(Being the tale of our moving from the big city to the big country)

Preamble

To move to the country or remain in the city. That was the decision that I was facing. I had lived in the city all my life, except for my first ten years or so. These I spent with my parents in small town Ontario. Peterborough and Orillia mostly but, in the case of Orillia, on the outskirts where they let me run and be free. I fought snow drifts with my magical stick sword, I floated twig boats down the overflowing ditches in the soggy spring. I inhabited a tree house in the darkest forest, skated on the sheer, transparent ice of Lake Simcoe, where I was blown from one side to the other by the prevailing winds while chasing the fish in the shallows of the lake. I went fishing and swam in early May then recovered from hypothermia and spent afternoons playing soldiers with my friends in the summer, and snowball wars in the winter. I had a puppy and a budgie, and I raised white mice. More on that sad conflict later. So, looking back on it, I guess I had experienced a rural life to some degree. Except that we weren’t isolated. But we were Catholic, so isolation was a pre-existing condition back then.

Now here I was, some sixty years later, being forced by circumstances and finances to make a major decision. I could stick it out in the city, facing increasingly ridiculous rents, a traffic system that was sometimes referred to as the tenth circle of hell and a dwindling work call. That or I (and by I, I mean we, with Brooke, my partner) could look for cheaper accommodation in the nearby countryside.

And so it was that I came to be driving eastward, to look at a property for lease that Brooke had sussed out with the aid of a friend and relations in Roseneath, Ontario. At one point, I came to be standing on the side of a road, taking a break and staring out over a field full of strange, four-legged animals. Cows, I think they’re called. It was then that the heavens moved, and I was enlightened.

As I leaned against the rusty wire fence, I could hear these ‘cows’ making strange sounds. At first, I thought they were just making some sort of plaintiff call to each other. Perhaps trying to find a mate. Is that how it works with cows? Are there male cows? Then, I began to understand just how territorial these animals could be. As one approached the other in a particularly sweet, grassy area, a resonant ‘Move!” could be heard. This was taking place all over the field although, thankfully, they never came to blows about it.

I listened more carefully and realized that some of them were staring at me with their big, vacant eyes. That was my first epiphany. Could it be that they were telling me I should move? Were they encouraging me for some obscure bovine reason to join them in this seemingly docile environment. Possibly. At any rate, I put that in my pocket and added it to the pile of ever-growing evidence that supported a turn in life.

 It wasn’t until much later that I happened on a small book in the children’s section of the local library, that I came to realize that they were really saying ‘moo’ not ‘move!’. You see, there were no libraries in the sixties in Canada, so as a child I never came to read about mooing and cawing and baaing and the like. (Cows, crows and sheep; for you city folk.) And so, I left the cows peacefully chewing on their ‘cruds,’ returned to my car and continued my drive.

(editor’s note: Adrian, I think you might be referring to ‘cuds’ there. i.e. partly digested food returned from a cow’s first stomach to its mouth for further chewing. Not ‘cruds’ which has an entirely different meaning. Also, I’m quite sure there were libraries in Canada prior to 1960. MM)

First Impressions

Following my nifty phone map app, I navigated the empty country roads until I arrived at the ‘farmhouse’ located on the outskirts of Roseneath. As I drove along the tree-lined road leading up the hill towards my destination, I couldn’t help but think about how beautiful this passage would look in the summer. (It being late winter/early spring at the time.) The green-leafed branches would form a tunneled canopy along portions of the straight road. I wondered how many times I would be traversing these roads should the house prove to be the right one and we took it over. Little did I know just how many times. But, as it turned out, I was right about the beauty of the landscape in the summer. And the winter, too, for that matter.

There was a little snow on the driveway as I pulled into the farm. And there it was, the small two-story affair that would become known locally as Casa Loca. It was a fleshy brown in colour and had what looked like a newish roof. A good start, I thought. The roof part, I mean, not the colour. It was sitting on about a half-acre of tree-covered grounds with a long driveway that ended in a turnabout at one end. Adjacent to the turnabout were two large, metal barns.

This place used to be a cow farm at one time. (Cows, again.) Barns have always intrigued me and exploring them in the summer would be fun, I thought. What forgotten treasures would I find? What mysteries, unfold? Truth be told, I didn’t know much about barns. Except that bad-guys in movies generally hid out in them when running from the law.  Maybe, one day, I too would be on the run and turn to the barn for refuge. I suppose I should mention here that my imagination sometimes gets the better of me.

(editor’s note: Adrian, it isn’t a good idea for a writer to confess to a vivid imagination, it’s sort of part of the job description. Pretty much a prerequisite, I’d say. Unless you’re writing power-tool manuals, of course. MM)

I parked the car, and Brooke was there to greet me at the back door. How charming and rustic, I thought, and I could imagine her in a light gingham frock, greeting me in the future with a warm apple pie in her hands as our cats pranced merrily in and out, mouses in their maws. I could almost smell the pie but understood right away that the gingham dress would likely remain a fantasy.

Oh, yes, the cats. We have two of them that we adopted a few months before at a pet adoption fair in Toronto and was one of the main reasons we concluded that a move would be necessary. They were both young; Ziggy the orange kitten was only a couple of months old when we got him, and Marcus Aurelius Puss Puss, the older cat was about 2 years. I had joked to Brooke, who had never had a kitten before, how they would be boinging all over the walls and furniture and how jolly it was to witness their tireless rampaging up and down the halls. The reality, however, was that we almost came to blows with the grumpy, troglodyte neighbours downstairs who would scream up the stairwell to “control those f___ing cats!” We spent many sleepless nights figuring out ways to stifle their noise. It quickly became incredibly stressful and leant a certain degree of urgency to exploring for different accommodation.

(editor’s note: Don’t know about using the ‘f___ing’ form. I mean, for Pete’s sake, everyone knows what you mean and they’re all saying it in their minds when they read it. So why not just fucking say it? MM)

(editor’s note: Also… Marcus Aurelius Puss Puss? MM)

When I stepped into the house the first thing that struck me was the smell. Nobody had lived in the house for over ten years and, before that, just sporadically for some years prior. It had a smell that I could remember as a kid when my friends and I found the remnants of an old internment or refugee camp from the second world war close to Orillia. We had discovered it while riding our bikes out to this remote place where we found the ‘village’ of small, dilapidated cement huts located. The people that had lived there had obviously been crammed into these small huts in groups. There were tattered curtains, lots of dirt and pieces of old clothing and assorted belongings that had been left behind when the war had ended, and the people released. You can imagine that smell I would think. This house smelled like that.

There were thick slabs of insulation blocking off the stairs to the second story and the basement. The kitchen was relatively modern and seemed to have been a later addition with pine wainscot walls and lots of cupboards. At the same time as I was sizing up the amount of work that would be needed to clean the rest of the place up and make it livable, I was trying to imagine myself living there. I was dubious, to be honest, that I could. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about it.

Brooke showed me around pointing out fun things like the room on the main floor that had been turned into a bedroom for the owner's wife, who had eventually died there. You know, fun things like that. Brooke had pried the Styrofoam cover boards off the staircase, and we went upstairs and had a look. Spiders. Lots of spiders. Oh, and did I mention the sachets of mouse poison in the living room? Well, there were sachets of mouse poison in the living room. No dead mousey corpses, thankfully. Except in one of the couches.

Brooke, however, could see the potential of the place, somehow, and I had to admit that if weren’t for the state of the place, the layout would be ideal for the two us and our furry children. There was space for a studio for Brooke, who is an artist amongst other things, and an office space for me to set up my sound equipment and computers and such. Oh, right, I forgot to mention that I am an actor by trade, specializing in the voice side of the business. The place was quiet. Incredibly quiet and that bode well for recording as well as peace of mind.

The room that I would be taking for an office was chocked full of paintings from floor to ceiling; dozens of them. Renata, the lady that had died, had been a prolific painter. Not only that room, but as it turned out, the basement was full of her renderings as well. Some of them are actually quite good. Mostly landscapes and paintings from photos of her family. That sort of thing. Various family members had kept the best of the paintings but there were still some nice pieces. As it turned out later, we found a good piece of tomatoes growing in a greenhouse which hangs in our bathroom to this day.

The more I wandered around, the more confused I became about the possibility of moving in here. The owner, Albert Stadke, an old retired German farmer, was not really of a mind to rent the place anymore as his last tenant had been problematic, but his current girlfriend, Erma, had convinced him to give us a go if we wanted and after he met Brooke and later, me, he agreed to rent it for an amount that was less than we were paying for our apartment in the city. In the end, it was probably that which made me decide it was worth giving it a go. Mind you, heat was included in the old apartment but not here. That would become an issue. A five hundred dollar a month issue.

I’ve got to say, the idea of moving after living in the same place for some forty years was more than daunting. It was traumatizing. Of course, there was the purely logistical chore of de-constructing the apartment. Packing and disposing of four decades of accumulated stuff, some necessary, some not, some sentimental, some reaching out from beyond the grave, forgotten remnants of days gone by. Then the winding down of accounts such as electrical service, internets and others and the setting up of these things in the new country. The hiring of movers, the need for storage space at the other end… well, the list goes on. Sleepless nights and stressful days. Fortunately, I had given us some leeway timewise by giving plenty of notice. But, also, you get tied to a place, you know? So many crazy, wonderful things had happened in that apartment. And the good memories far out-weighed the down times there.

Interesting side note: I had lived in this space for forty years, and had seen one crazy landlord go who, if I phoned him for something, would just start singing into the phone in a strange high-pitched voice. I later found out that he had mental issues of sufficient severity that his elderly mother had to take over the management of the three story walk up building in Roncesvalles Village and would eventually sell it to the current owners, the dry-cleaning operation on the ground floor. These folks, a Greek family, ran the place and weren’t crazy, at least not so much, and I thought that over the years I had built a decent relationship with them. I had never missed a rent payment in all that time and had traded off the fact that it was cheap rent with the fact that I did a lot of the repair work on the place myself. That is until they phoned me up one day and said that they wanted to double my rent. I pointed out the illegality of that, but they quoted the oft-used A14 bylaw that says the owner may evict the tenant if they wish to occupy the apartment themselves. They didn’t want to live in the apartment, of course, it was just a threat mechanism. But if you know anything about the dysfunctionality of the landlord/tenant dispute system in Ontario, you would know that if I challenged it, it would mean months if not years of lawyers, court dates etc., and that prospect was both dismal and potentially fruitless. Hence one of the major reasons for our move. But I digress. Point being, here it was after some forty years of co-habitation in the building but when I went downstairs to the dry cleaners, after all was packed and moved out, to say goodbye, I just got a stupid grin in return from the son, Gus. Undoubtedly, he was thinking of the even greater rent he would now charge the incoming tenants. I turned around and walked out and that was the end of my life on ‘Roncey’.

Sad side note: One of the few things that was difficult about leaving the area, was the disappointment I saw on the face of the old Polish lady who lived down the street and rented me my parking space when I told her we were moving. She would sit outside her apartment on the main street during the summer (and sometimes in the winter) and sell bits and pieces of stuff people would donate to her. Ostensibly to raise money for various Polish immigrant support groups, or so I understood. We had become quite good friends and both Brooke, and I would stop, when possible, to have a chat. She would give me huge bottles of cheap red wine on special occasions, and I would check on her from time to time if it were particularly cold out or I saw she’d left a door or window open. That kind of thing. She would refer to us in her thick Polish accent as ‘my peoples’ or ‘my neighbores’ and called Brooke her ‘baby’. My name was ‘Mr. Addrian’. I don’t think she ever knew my last name just as I didn’t know hers. She was just ‘Dana’ to everyone around. Even the caller ID on my phone just read Dana.

And so, after much deliberating back and forth and with no other options on the horizon, the decision was made and the deal entered into. We would surrender the old apartment by the first of June and take possession of the new house in May. This would give us time to arrange movers and shakers and at least begin to make the old farm habitable. In the meanwhile, we would travel back and forth to Toronto for assorted reasons. Mostly, the cats.

I knew nothing about Roseneath other than it bordered on the First Nations town of Alderville and that the two towns were divided by, wait for it, Division Street. That and occasionally in the past I had to drive down highway 45 coming or going from Toronto to the northeastern Ontario townships. It was always a pain to go through Roseneath/Alderville as you would be whistling along at a good clip and then find that you, and all the other cottage goers, would be forced to travel at fifty kilometres per hour for what seemed like forever. Now that I live here, I realize it only takes about five minutes, but when you’re in the middle of a three or four hour road trip, it did seem highly inconvenient.

Roseneath doesn’t have much in the way of shops or such. In fact, there aren’t any. There’s a library, a post-office, a country fairground with what I would discover later, was a famous carousel. There’s an abandoned general store, an abandoned diner, and some sort of garage/repair shop/used car emporium.

As for Alderville, it is a conglomeration of pot shops, gas stations and a couple of government buildings. Two families, the Crowes and the Smokes, seem to own just about everything here. We even ended up renting our storage unit from one of the Crowes. But by far the greater number of businesses, or so it would seem numerically, are devoted to selling weed and accompanying sundries. I’ve never actually counted them, but I would guess there are about a dozen of them that you can see stretched along the highway. Probably a few more back a bit off the highway. The gas stations are a bonus for us in the area as the gas is substantially cheaper owing to the lack of taxes on their first nation owners. I thought I would do less driving up here, simply because there would be less reason to drive anywhere, but that was a mistake, so the gas bonus turned out to be a godsend.

Driving north from Cobourg and passing through the non-existent town of Fenella, you come across a general store called the Red Barn, which sells a bit of everything, but of low quality and over-priced at that. I guess that’s okay because they’re the only game in town except for a convenience store in Alderville called Sweetleaf. It is also, more importantly, the only liquor control outlet in the area. To get to the bigger food stores you must go south to Cobourg or north to Hastings.

Speaking of Cobourg, our boat, the Mary Mary, a thirty-six foot Grand Banks trawler, had been seeking a home for a couple of years. The move we were now deciding to make was, in part, to be closer to Brooke’s aging parents, to help out with them when needed. To that end we had been bringing the boat south from its earlier home on Georgian Bay, along the Trent Canal system, hoping to find a berth for it in southern waters. No, not those southern waters, with their grey dolphins and orange dauphins and the like, but southern Ontario. We were looking for a place to call home for her, in the water in summer and out of the water in the winter. This was not an easy task as many, if not most, marinas were full and most also wouldn’t store boats in the winter if you didn’t reside there in the summer. We had tried, unsuccessfully, in the past to contact the Cobourg Marina but were told that the best they could do would be to put us on a lengthy waiting list that might not clear up for six or seven years. But on a whim, one day, I gave them a call and were told that I was lucky to have called on that particular day because new city management had just determined that a significant amount of those on the list waiting for a place were found to be dead. They didn’t say whether this information came because of a police investigation.

At any rate, there were now eleven spots left, and did I want one of them? Yes, I managed to choke out, my heart racing fiercely. Okay, they said, send us some money and we’ll hold a place for you until you arrive. I mention all this because it was one more sign that we were making the right decision about moving. The marina in Cobourg is just under two hours from Toronto but just under half an hour from the farmhouse. This came as a great relief and although Lake Ontario doesn’t offer the best of environments for a trawler such as ours, being a windy lake more suitable for sailboats, voyages could be made to more pleasing boating grounds such as the Thousand Islands and the Rideau Canal. You can’t imagine what a relief it was to know that the poor old Mary Mary wouldn’t be frozen into the water this winter, in some lake or river somewhere, a home for wayward otters and the like waiting for the ice that would crush the hull like a paper mâché pinata.

Having made the decision to bug out of TO, it became necessary to make the house habitable. Brooke took on the lion’s share of this but, to begin with, we had to remove all the sheet insulation from the windows and hallways and together with assorted spiders and other unidentifiable life-forms, move the sheets either to the basement or out to one of the two barns. The barns were filled with boats and RVs, stored there for a fee by their owners, but there was room to stick the sheets. We wandered around the barn looking at the various vehicles. Amongst them was a beautiful vintage tractor and sports car. What these people were thinking of by storing their precious boats and vehicles in a mouse-ridden barn is beyond me. Later we found that one of the owners was actually trying to get the owners to pay for the damage done by such a mouse family.

After that, it was a matter of clearing the house of all the leftovers from the original family and the woman that had been a temporary resident. Each room was stuffed with old wooden furniture, paintings, televisions and such. Some of this stuff we stuck in the basement. A basement, I might add, that had obviously been used as a horror movie set. Or should have been. Nests from various four-legged inhabitants, yet more spiders and creepy crawlers and a dank smell from the floor and walls that fortunately didn’t penetrate entirely to the upstairs. There was an old dehumidifier that was obviously overburdened by the whole thing and was sitting panting in the corner by the sump pump. The beams in the ceiling of the basement were bent in a crazy downward bow and consisted of cut trees. Apparently, this century house had been built without a basement but one was added later. I suppose these tree beams were initially floor support set into the ground. I could be wrong about that. I’m no architect. The whole house was on a slant actually and if one didn’t stop oneself upon entering the kitchen from the living room, you could find yourself running towards the back door. Perhaps it was built this way intentionally, to facilitate hasty exits from indiscreet liaisons. We seem to have gotten used to this, however, but it’s always fun to watch visitors teetering towards destruction.

Finally, when the rooms were cleared it was a matter of ripping up the orange shag rug and other carpeting and getting rid of that. Some of the downstairs furniture had to go even though it was in relatively decent shape. We had our own stuff coming in on moving day and there certainly wasn’t going to be room for all. We didn’t want to stick the stuff in the barn, or it might have received the same mousey attention as the cars and boats, so we stuck a couple of pieces; a couch and an armchair out on the front deck. This turned out to be a bad idea really as, from the road, it made the place look like some sort of hillbilly hotel. Also, even though the furniture was basically abandoned and left to critters, the owner was chagrined to see it sitting out, covered now in a light dusting of snow, and he and one of his sons came later and transported it to the barn where it now sits, sort of like a Trump Tower for rats. Or is that redundant?

(editor’s note: Careful there, Adrian… The walls have ears. MM)

Once the furniture was out, Brooke set about fixing the various holes and weak spots in the walls. Learning as she went to patch and make good these injuries, and after some demanding work the rooms were eventually ready to go. We had made the decision a while back that we weren’t going to paint the whole house as it was wall-papered and would have taken years to do. Instead, we left certain parts with the paper and patching here and there, the whole effect was sort of like a house that, again, might appear in a movie, but more along the lines of a faded southern mansion in an antebellum drama by Tennessee Williams. We felt we could live with that. I even bought a Panama hat and cheroot to sit around with. I already had the ripped undershirt and faded white pants.

MOVING DAY

It took a lot of work and worry but we eventually started moving things by car to the new house. This meant packing one or both of our Volvos (Volvae?) and driving the two hours each time we wanted to bring a load. Climbing up and down the stairs at the apartment (a third-story walk-up) was a pretty grueling exercise but with patience and at one point a helping hand by a guy named Mathew that we had found via a poster on a bus shelter, we managed. I gave Mathew a 4-track recording mini-studio I had that I was going to give away anyway and he was pretty happy to get that as well as his requested hourly rate. I don’t know if he ever got it to work properly but he said that he could get it done.

(Editor's note: I think it's probably Volvi. MM)

As the time ticked down to moving day, things became more stressful, and I had to put off the date by a week or two. Thankfully, the company we hired was amenable to that. The cats, registering our stress levels, became more and more rambunctious, probably in part because their new house was being taken apart around them. Crazy midnight crash runs through the apartment were common and climbing up on shelves with sensitive photographic equipment, that sort of thing. Our sleep was irregular and filled with strange dreams of displacement and being lost and the like.

Finally, though, the day did arrive and we waited impatiently looking out the window for the truck and two helpers to appear. As we lived on the major thoroughfare of Roncesvalles Ave., securing a parking space out front of our building was a bit on an issue. We stuck our two cars out there over night with some space between them. Not enough for another car to get into mind you. I had thought that probably the team would show up in a regular large five-ton truck but as it turned out, they had a smaller U-Haul renter. I was afraid, at first, that it wouldn’t be big enough for the entire load of large furniture and many boxes that awaited them but in the end it all fit. I can’t begin to tell you what a relief it was to finally get the stuff on the move. And there was no way, with my knee issues, I could have gone up and down those two flights of stairs carrying heavy stuff. But the two fellows that came along; two recently arrived Iranian cousins, that were gracious, robust and seemingly tireless. Not only did they get the stuff out and into the truck, but they also then drove the two hours to the farmhouse and then had to unload it all! All in the guaranteed time limit. Which they did, although by the end of it I think they had had just about enough. We thanked them, tipped them well and then posed for a photograph of the happy couple that their company could post online. They would get a bonus for that apparently. I saw it later online and in fact, we did look happy. Happy that it was over to a great extent, I suppose. I wonder what it would have been like had we had more reticent helpers. It made me think again about those who call for a halt to immigration. We had an enjoyable conversation with the two young guys and found them to be supporting a large part of their family with these well-paying but grueling jobs. Both of them had other occupations, one in music, they would one day be pursuing.

Sitting down for our first dinner with all our stuff piled around us was a great relief. The next few weeks would be about unpacking, positioning things and continuing the process of renovation. I’m still loathe at this point to spend too much money and time fixing up somebody else’s house, but the fact is we are living here now and nowhere else. Some things can be improved cosmetically, but other things like holes in walls can’t wait for somebody else to get around to it. Certainly, the old German farmer who is now our landlord wasn’t going to do much. “I don’t care. Do what you want!” I think were his words. He does, however, drive his red pickup truck slowly up and down the driveway virtually every day to check in on things. Can’t blame him I suppose. Even though he couldn’t bear to live here anymore, the house still had a lot of attachments for him.

A word about our rental arrangement. Being old school and not inclined towards paperwork and legalities, he insisted that we wouldn’t have a written lease. This, of course, was disconcerting, but we found out from a couple of sources that we needn’t worry too much about that as a money trail could be easily proved with consistent banks statements and the like. The amount we agreed to was a good deal less than we had been paying for our apartment in Toronto so that was a good thing. We would also be paying the electricity and heating bills. The heating is provided by a new furnace which is a good thing. It is fueled by propane which is not quite as good a thing as we found out when the first propane bills arrived. Basically, it put us back into the same rental bracket that we’d been in before. When you add on internet and satellite fees, then it starts to add up. On the other hand, we don’t pay parking rentals and things of that nature. Even with all that, I still feel we had made the right decision. Of course, the jury would be out on that until we experienced, for a while, what living in a rural setting like this would be like.

We weren’t exactly recluses in the big city, but certainly, over the years, I found it increasingly unnecessary to be out and about like when I was younger. Working in the entertainment industry meant that you were around people quite a bit so when work began to taper off because of changing circumstances and a certain amount of ageism, the people effect began to lessen. Now I thought perhaps we might be more inclined to socialize. Especially since one of the main reasons to be here was to get closer to Brooke’s aging parents. Her father has Alzheimer’s, and her mother is increasingly in need of support. So undoubtedly, we will be seeing more of those two.

The cats are enjoying their new-found freedom and run with wild abandon around the house and up and down the staircase. There are lots of nooks and crannies to be explored and it is a joy to not have the constant stress of worrying about the noise they make. We have yet to let them down into the basement mostly because its filthy and has remnants of mouse poison that could be an issue. We aren’t going to let them outside on their own either for health reasons. There are coyotes in the area and other predators that could make short work of two city house cats. I can’t even begin to imagine how horrible that would be. Having said that, there are a couple of strays that wander by occasionally. I suspect that they are holed up in one of the barns, although I haven’t seen them go in or out. Every now and then one of them will trot by with a chipmunk in its mouth, which is truly gross, but I guess inevitable. There are dozens of chipmunks around, so I guess, as a food source, they are easy pickings.

I forgot to mention that when we moved, not only did the movers have to take all our junk to the farmhouse, but they also had to make a way stop in Cobourg to deliver some of the items to a storage space we had arranged there. Even with the extrication of some of the items from the house, we still had more than it could accommodate so we rented a unit (we later switched to an Alderville storage place) and stuffed some items in there. It was after that that they moved on towards the farmhouse. I followed in my car; Brooke already having gone ahead with the cats. When we came to a certain turn off, the boys in the van went in the wrong direction. I figured that they were using GPS and would quickly turn around, so I went on to the house. Well, it was quite a time later that the fellas showed up, a little shamefacedly. Turns out there was an extension of the 3^rd Line Road, on which we were located, and it had taken them quite a while to realize their mistake. When I was following them, I saw that they were swinging around the road like a drunken sailor. Driving big trucks was not their forte. So, I sat on the deck and waited for them to show up. Later, when we were about to give them their tip, sitting in the living room having a glass of water, they reminded me about that tip and I said that it was too bad because, having taken the wrong turn, I’d have to reconsider it. I was joking of course but their sad reaction was too much to bear so I whipped out the two fifties that I had obtained earlier in the day and handed them over with many thanks. Then we were all friends again. Apparently their sense of humour didn't extend to holding back payments.

They were as exhausted as were we, although they had done most of the heavy lifting, so we quickly wrapped it up, posed for their bonus picture and they careened off down the 3^rd line. I can honestly say that the sense of relief that this day was winding down with little in the way of bad incidents, was huge. Now the adventure was about to truly begin. There was no turning back now, the die had been cast. There was no longer a big city apartment to go back to and, come what may, we were stuck here for the foreseeable future. A future that, to me at any rate, was as much clouded in mystery as any I had ever faced. We were now country folk.

THE GROUNDS

The farmhouse is situated between two huge corn fields that this year, because of the rains, had yielded what I understand is described as a ‘bumper’ crop. The corn would eventually reach a height of about ten feet and totally obscured the house down the hill and most of the house up the hill too, totally enveloping us in a sea of green. It’s really something. Corn as high as an elephant’s eye as they say. Which is actually a pretty accurate description. Not that I’ve ever looked an elephant in the eye. Next summer it will be different as they will switch from corn to soy to meet the requirements of the soil. Then it will still be a sea of green, but at low tide.

There is a natural humidity given off by corn that is greater than most other plants and that, together with the trees and ground growth surrounding the building, created a zone of suffocating humidity that was something to behold when the summer got hot. Plants on the inside of the house that usually were watered about once a week barely needed watering at all. It wasn’t until we got some air conditioners going that it was even tolerable in some rooms.

Let me tell you about the grounds. First, the good.

From spring to late summer there was an ongoing parade of flowering plants that was a joy to the eye and the heart. In early spring came orange lilies and yellow tulips and a large bed of bright blue-purple allium that made driving into the place feel like you were visiting the Royal gardens. There were also a golden forsythia bush and white hydrangea that came in later and gave even more colour. If you don’t know hydrangea, they are the bushes with the huge white or coloured flowering balls of petals. There was a vine growing up a trellis on the porch at the front of the house that we thought was dead. Later this bloomed into bright orange trumpet flowers, much to our amazement. "It's wonderful how city kids are amazed at how things grow in the country!" Pierre Trudeau said that. Underneath the flowers at the side of the house, ground cover plants of diverse types had been planted and had jumped the low surrounding stone enclosure and were growing right up to the driveway. The trees, evenly placed around the grounds, consisted of maple and ash with some apple trees mixed in. There is a lot of invasive species too that, once the grounds were at full bloom, encased the house and totally isolated it from the other houses and the road. Spectacular.

Then came the dog-strangling vine. The bad.

Because the house hadn’t been lived in for many years the grounds, unattended, had become a jungle of weeds and vines that were crawling up and killing a lot of the mature trees. What I guess you would call the floor of the garden was a mass of tangled undergrowth, mostly these vines, which crept and took over everything they met. Several large trees had been cut down at one point because they were dead or dying and threatening the house or hydro-wires. The trunks of these massive trees had just been left to rot on the grounds and the vines had used them as a base for further operations. Several species of huge fungi had also taken root along with Burdock weed, that resembled great rhubarb plants. It was a huge mess.

But the worst was the dog-strangling vine. It could climb as high as forty feet up the trees and were killing things left and right. It was everywhere. I suspected that if we fell asleep outside, we would wake up to find a clone of ourselves growing. I borrowed a weed-whacker from Brooke’s parents and attacked it a bit at a time, but it was relentless. It was like the Day of  the Triffids. We spent hours cutting the vines, the older ones of which had grown to a bark-covered thickness of two or three inches. These had to be cut down with a pole saw (one of the many gardening tools we would be forced to obtain.) At one point, in cutting these vines we mistakenly cut down a very old lilac bush that had intertwined with the dog-stranglers. We quickly learned the difference between them though and that was the only misstep of that sort. I think. 

(Editor's note: Adrian, might need to explain the film references there. The Body Snatchers & Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham... not that well known. Of course, I never watch TV being incredibly short-sighted. MM)

The logs and trunk parts scattered around the property are an issue. It makes using some machinery on the vines almost impossible as you can’t tell when you’re heading into trouble by cutting too deep and finding a sizable chunk of wood there. Later in the summer when most of the flowering was over, I bought one of those new cordless weed eaters and spent a few days cutting down the worst of the vines which normally would be over green grass. The cats are having a grand time running up and down the line that we stretched from one of the trees to another further down. They go into hunting mode of course and Ziggy has already caught a mole and a chipmunk that we had to force his jaws open to relinquish. Marcus is into it too but misses more often than not. He is a weighty cat, some 15 pounds and can’t quite get the speed going that the more agile Ziggy can.

We started creating huge piles of brush that we had either cleared by hand or cut down with our pole saw. We hired a young guy to help tow them out to behind the barn, which is where, apparently, all things you don’t want to look at go.

Early on we hired another guy and his helper to clear all the old furniture and paintings out of the house and he hauled that away to the local landfill. He mentioned at the time that he could also help with the brush, which he did later. But he charged a lot more than the single kid and his ATV that we used later. It’s a long, laborious job bringing this garden back to its former glory, but I think we made a good start before the winter set in and we’re both looking forward to getting back at it in the spring. With a lot of the extraneous weed matter removed it should be easier to maintain. I hope. It might be wishful thinking as those vines were ubiquitous and I doubt we got many of the roots, so it could be a battle. So be it.

SOCIALIZING

One of the incentives of moving to this particular area, other than to get closer to the rellies, was the fact that many of our fellow artists had chosen to assume residence here. In the city, I guess because of the constant nearness of everybody, there never really seemed a need to get in touch physically with anyone on a constant level. Out here, however, it seems somehow important to touch base with the people who are also living a relatively isolated existence. So having dinner with people and hooking up with them from time to time seems to happen much more often.

Of course, we have meals with Brooke’s mum and dad fairly regularly, but in the last few months we have also attended art gallery openings, music concerts and many other things that, although we did them in the city now and then, had trailed off in importance for the last few years. I suppose its because of the relative isolation of things here at Casa Loca that we seem to be getting out more.

My brother and his wife came to stay for a couple of nights (another thing that didn’t happen much in the city) and it coincided with a ‘psychedelic fair’ sponsored by a local woman we had come to know. It took place at the Roseneath fairgrounds and consisted of a couple of bands, a head-liner named Pretty and the sale of some local crafts. In actuality it was a bit of a bust really, not very well attended and low-key. The band was good though and we bought the obligatory t-shirt.

Our landlord was there, and other members of his family connected to the young woman that had put on the show, and although we couldn’t get him up to dance, his girl-friend jumped up and was ready to boogie. She’s probably in her eighties but she could still cut a rug. A better rug than me I’d say, what with my bad knees and all. After a couple of hours, it was all over, and we cleared out. I think I’m safe in saying that we wouldn’t likely have attended such a thing in the city.

We missed opportunities to have people on the boat down in Cobourg Harbour this past summer. There never seemed to be enough time to book such a thing in the early days and we felt bad about neglecting the old girl. As it got closer to haul-out time, however we did manage to get down there a few times to start the ceiling renovation in the forward berth. Still, quite a different boating life than when we spent almost the entire summer on the boat up in the wilds of Georgian Bay.

THE WEATHER AND THE VIEWS

I suppose you would describe me as a city boy. I’ve lived in cities pretty much my whole adult life. Which isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the countryside and the flora and fauna and such. In fact, when on the rare occasion I’ve been on holiday, the topography and animal life are always one of the chief factors in selecting a destination. As a diver, I’ve never been interested in the chilly waters of Canada. Lakes and rivers in Canada hold, at best, a few species of fish that taste better than they look. Down south though, in places like the Caribbean, the visual wonders of the underwater world are nothing short of breathtaking. So, yes, visuals are particularly important to me.

We have been at Casa Loca for parts of four seasons now and each one has had its appeal. We arrived here just as winter was leaving and the ratty snow and rain of March and April gave way to a burst of life that was quite astonishing to see. We were looking forward to the trees and grasses blooming but nothing could have prepared us for the wealth of colour and variety that exploded onto the scene after the first flowers sprang up.

The family who had lived here were, of course, farmers, but the wife of the patriarch and subsequently the boys and wives of boys, had separately built a large green house next to the main structure. Their love of this kind of growing was made even more obvious when the various beds of flowers and flowering bushes began to appear. The green house is long gone now, moved a couple of fields over to where the family now lives and runs their garden operation, Yonna’s Green Houses. But the magnificent array of colour we inherited is a bonus we couldn’t have expected.

Then when summer was fully established and the trees were in full leaf, you could barely see the surrounding countryside and the few houses situated on hills here and there. Except for areas of the front deck which have been kept clear at one end to reveal the sweeping hills of field and forest leading to a small slice of Rice Lake in the distance.

One of our first spring chores had been to clear and repair the deck which was slanted at a bad angle, owing to a collapse of the underlying beams at one end. Our good friend Gary Mulcahy came to our rescue with a large jack, and we pried the deck up and threw supporting cement blocks underneath for support. That fixed up, we turned to the rails that had been forced apart and using connecting pieces of wood, made them sturdy. A few deck chairs that had been left behind, had been cleaned and cushioned and an outdoor table brought in from storage. One of the really nice additions was a large table umbrella, a cantilevered product that didn’t require a centre pole and swings gently in the constant light breeze. I built a long, raised table that would suit the two high garden chairs that were also left behind by the previous owners and we bought cushions for those as well. Now we had a wooden table with four folding chairs, a high bench table with two tall chairs, two loungers and a glass-top bistro set that we had brought with us from the apartment balcony. It sort of looks like a bistro itself now, with space to accommodate up to twelve people on some sort of seat. Later we would add a string of lights and some floodlights on the trees that made it quite lovely at night and even more like a bistro.

There are lots of birds in the dense woods of the property so getting a couple of bird-feeders up and running was important. Brooke took care of that and later she constructed winter feeders. I had purchased a bird recognition app that you could use with a phone to identify birds by their calls. In no time I had a couple of dozen distinct species and their bright colours and even more colourful sound was deeply gratifying, at pretty much any time of day. These days we wake up to the view through the large bedroom picture window of our feathery friends chowing down. A flock of big Blue Jays arrives every morning around nine. There are woodpeckers of different varieties, little yellow goldfinches, less colourful but numerous other small birds and two turtle doves. No partridges, but no pear trees for them anyway. And squirrels of the black, gray and red variety. And a sizable number of chipmunks.

We’ve also had visits from an opossum, a skunk and the aforementioned barn cats. So, lots of life. We had been fortunate in the city to have a back balcony that overlooked an area blocked in by the backs of many houses, forming a large square of garages, back yards and huge trees, so we had quite a few birds and, of course, raccoons. But the abundance of birdlife here is quite astounding.

I mentioned the corn that by all accounts was a bumper crop. Well, that greenery made the setting complete as, with the barns, we were totally surrounded by verdant vibrant life. Unfortunately, the corn that grew wasn’t of the sweet variety and wasn’t intended for consumption. That didn’t stop us from trying of course and I took a cob into boil it and see what would happen. What happened was an unfortunate culinary experience. Well, we are from the city, after all.

When you drive to the farmhouse from Highway 45, you are met with sweeping views of various crops and roads that are covered by a canopy of large trees that swoop into each other almost forming a green tunnel. We’ve seen deer on the drive in and hope to see more. Lots of wild turkeys and turkey vultures inhabit the area as well. These are the biggest birds of course and every now and then you can hear shotguns going off in the distance as some farmer tries to keep them away from his crops.

Later in the season we were given a Kota grill for the deck by Brooke’s sister and brother-in-law. These Finnish grills are open contained fire pits, with seating around them and various cast iron grills and holders for cast iron pots and pans. You can seat six around them and they utilize hardwood for fuel. This addition made the deck a wonderful place to hang-out and cook and eat and read and eat and drink and eat some more. Because of the generous size of the deck and all the seating we joked about opening our own bistro, Casa Loca, and could imagine swarms of hungry patrons on a summer’s evening. Naturally, the amount of work involved in such an endeavour ensured that that dream would remain a fantasy.

The fireplace the Kota provided became particularly nice in the fall when the cool evenings were perfect for sitting around a fire. The fireplace wasn’t probably a thing that would go over well with local authorities but when we mentioned it the owners, they said it was highly unlikely anyone would ever notice and that they certainly didn’t have a problem with it. So, we had fires. I was a bit leery of having these fires so close to this old frame house, but we were careful and had water hoses standing by and never left the fire unattended by at least one of us. As time wore on, I thought less and less about that potential disaster. We thought for a bit about building a platformed enclosure in one of the spots further away from the house but that has yet to be realized. Maybe next year. Here’s what a Kota Grill looks like. 

The  Kota Grill with Brooke attached

We spent time that summer with the cats on leashes and lines out on the back grass of the farm where I had erected our stand-alone hammock and a cool drink, and a pillow became an almost daily ritual. As my acting career is now in a state of near non-existence, I had plenty of time for such rituals. Sadly. Or not.

As mentioned before, the humidity given off by the greenery surrounding us was almost over-whelming in the dog-days of summer. We had to occasionally water some of the flowerbeds, but not often as the moisture in the air was plentiful. The only gardening we did really was to try to make inroads in the strangling vine masses as best we could. By the end of the fall, we had managed to extricate a lot of the trees from their clingy foes, but that job was so tiring that we had little time to actually ‘garden’. I cleared a lot of the dross out of the flower beds, but it won’t be until the next spring arrives that we will get a clear picture of where we stand with it all. We’re hoping the vines and weeds won’t come back in so great a number and I don’t think that’s an unreasonable expectation as the grounds, like I said, had been neglected for years, so maybe the work that we did will make it possible to start really gardening and shaping the property. Being English, I’m supposed to be fairly good at these so hopes are high.

I’m beginning to feel like we fit in here. Brooke is ecstatic most of the time and it couldn’t be a more suitable environment for her and her desire to continue with her artwork. My hope is to continue writing and working on different animation projects. And we both want to continue to fix up the house, especially the basement where it is hoped we can fashion a workshop area to facilitate carpentry projects and the like.

THE BUGS

As a rule, I don’t mind bugs. Unless they’re hideously ugly or crawling around your living space, or down your neck, then, not so much.

When we first arrived at Casa Loca, we noticed a fair amount of what I later became informed of were ‘cluster’ flies (Named so for obvious reasons, I suppose), a lot of daddy longlegs spiders in the upstairs quarters that we had re-opened, and on the window ledges, floor and just about everywhere else, Asian Lady Beetles.

I had heard stories of the cluster flies from friends in the area, that they arrived annually in swarms and, having wintered in your attic, would make their way down below to infest window casings and such. Leaving behind their little bodies that would quickly accumulate and pose a nasty visual and health threat.

The daddy long legs were easy enough to suck off the ceiling with the vacuum cleaner and after a period of time, grew less and less in number until, now, it is rare to see one.

But the lady beetles… another story. Not to be confused with their benign cousins the common ladybug, these insidious beasties had been introduced as an invasive species by the government who hoped their voracious appetites would stem the growth of the other invasive species, purple loose strife, or so I was given to understand. Of course, like the Cane Toads of Australia, released in North Queensland in 1935 to help control beetles that were damaging sugar cane crops, and that quickly became pests, migrating rapidly to poison native species, the lady beetles are now ubiquitous in Ontario. Especially, at the time, in our windows. I figure most of the Ontario variety live there now.

At first, I thought that once we established ourselves here, we would just kill them off, but I was very wrong about this and, despite weeks of sucking them up with the vacuum they would all be back the next morning. We despaired, thinking at the time, if the house was infested with them, we wouldn’t be able to endure it. They weren’t particularly ugly, but anything like that in a large, wriggling mass is disconcerting. And they smelled. Badly. Especially if you crushed one. The only course of action was the vacuum and after a day or two of sucking them up, horrible odours emanated from the bag. We would take the bags and dispose of them, of course, but the cost of replacing the bags every other day wasn’t appealing either.

Finally, I went to the hardware store and bought some universal bug spray that was supposedly harmless for pets but would constrain the bugs. It certainly brought the numbers down but not enough. Then we heard, from the owners, that the beetles usually appeared in the spring and that the best way to eradicate them was by spraying the outside of the house. To this end we were sent to a nice fellow who arrived a few days later and with his magic wand of death, destroyed the remaining bugs and promised that, after he fogged the attic with spray, that it should stop them from reproducing in numbers in the spring.

Well, the problem seems to be solved, at least in the immediate, but time will tell if that relief extends into the spring. Lady Beetles… yuck.

THE AREA

As mentioned before, the farmhouse sits in the middle of the surrounding farmlands not more than a kilometre and a bit from downtown Roseneath. Roseneath is a strange little town, more of a village really. There is a community building with a library and the council chambers found within. It also has a general purpose hall that can be used to accommodate anything from wedding receptions to pickle ball tournaments. In high school, we used to call a big, echoey room like this, the gymnatorium. Behind this building is the public school.

The town is laid out along Highway 45 for maybe two kilometres total and consists of that community hall, the fairgrounds mentioned before and one or two other buildings like the firehall/works department and a strange place covered in used cars, edging right out onto the highway which I am given to understand houses a repair shop and used car salesmen. There must be fifty cars of various vintages, sprawled about in no clear pattern threatening to overflow onto the street.

There is an abandoned general store that is empty and has been for sale since we got here. This despite the fact that it is selling for the very reasonable price of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It has a living space in the back and sits on a corner lot. Somebody had talked about turning it into a pub, which is probably a promising idea as there isn’t one in the immediate area. You have to drive north to Hastings for such luxury. It would require some work to be sure but could possibly work.

Right across the road from the general store is the Roseneath Diner, another abandoned structure that is really shouting out for somebody to come and re-open. Right now, it is just a parking place for one of the many school busses in the area. Peering in through the dusty windows, you can see a sit-down counter with traditional round stools in the entrance area and then a fancier dining room with chairs and tables. It doesn’t take much for me to imagine taking it on myself if I had some dough. I could see myself as the owner manager and part time chef, although that would wear thin in time, I suspect. I had the concept of a diner totally devoted to stews. I fancy myself as a pretty could fashioner of stews. My gumbo, for instance, has made people groan. In a good way. Then I thought, why not a coffee shop for people traversing the highway to their cottages or such. 45 is really the only option when heading north in this area so they’d have to go by and perhaps stop in for one of Cappie’s Raspberry Braids. (I also consider myself to be a competent baker.)

The fairgrounds are fairly large and contain one of the few remaining wooden horse carousels, housed in a sealed-in octagonal building, the sides of which open up when the ride is functioning. We attended this year’s Fall Fair, and it was really well attended. Hundreds of people, a midway, barns housing animal and crop exhibits and a racetrack. Quite impressive really, except we missed the big events of crop and livestock judging. The farmer we rent from used to enter it and according to him he regularly walked away with awards for his crops and Holstein cattle. So many awards, according to him, that he stopped entering. This, I think, was him having his country way with the newbies.

Most of the families living about are either older, established ones or retirees who opted, like us, to move out of the city. Although I don’t consider us retirees. Old actors don’t retire, we just fade away, as they say. Younger families can’t afford to live around here apparently as the proximity to larger towns makes it very desirable thus more expensive.

BOATING

As I mentioned, we are the proud owners of a Grand Banks Classic 36 trawler named Mary Mary and over the last couple of boating seasons, we’ve been bringing her down from Georgian Bay to Lake Ontario via the Trent-Severn Waterway. We’ve done that entire trip, fifty-four locks, a couple of times now and have spent much time in the area we now live, boating through its many lakes and rivers. 

The Mary Mary, dressed to kill

 We decided to bring her down this way permanently when we realized that the failing health of Brooke’s father required us to be closer to hand during the summer months, which we usually spent the greater part of in our old home port of Wright’s Marina at Byng Inlet.

As we weren’t making the trip south in one fell swoop, it became necessary to leapfrog a pair of cars along the route so that we would have ready transportation when needed. This was, with being a pain in the ass, difficult logistically, but in the end, we managed it and as mentioned before, the boat now sits in Cobourg Harbour.

The one interesting aspect of this boat and car movement was that we spent many hours driving between the various towns and marinas along the route. So, when we came to move into the Roseneath area, we already had a fairly good idea of the layout of the highways and byways hereabout.

The long sweeping highways and side-roads, passing between soft rolling hills and farmlands was always a side benefit of the boat travelling. Although, in later days, it became a bit of an unwanted chore.

Whenever we were at a lock, which usually coincided with a nearby town, we would check out the various amenities the town had to offer. Again, when we actually came to live in the area, we already had a rather good idea of where to go to obtain various things. Or avoid, as the case may be.

As a boy, I grew up, as I said, partly in Peterborough and partly in Orillia, Ontario, both which you pass through on your journey along the Trent. Peterborough, especially, is just one of those towns that for assorted reasons, I always end up back in. I don’t know how this came to be but every few years I would find myself wandering around the bleak downtown of that blue-collar berg, wondering how it was I came to be there. My mother’s memorial tree is at the cemetery there, at least it was until a snow plow knocked it down. My father’s ashes have been scattered, from the boat, into Little Lake, namesake body of water of the cemetery. But even before these obvious reasons to return to the city, I found myself there for one reason or another. I guess I’ll end up there too when I’m beckoned to the great beyond. In fact, I’ll probably find once I regain consciousness in the void it will look very much like Peterborough. God, what a thought.

COUNTRY MEDICINE

As I mentioned before, a good part of the logistics of transitioning from city mouse to country mouse are all the things you take for granted in the city, given how long you may have been a city mouse. For instance, your phone number, the same one of which I have had since time immemorial. A lot of people these days wouldn’t even know what a landline is, but having had one for like ever, it was surprisingly hard to let it go. For no reason whatsoever, I was sort of proud of the fact that the last four numbers were all the odd primes: one three, five, seven. This I felt all along would stand me in good stead, for instance if I ever began to lose my memory and could just say to whomever I was speaking with, “oh, its just all the odd numbers starting with one.” Granted that is a ridiculous reason to keep paying fifty bucks a month for the smug privilege of feeling numerically superior, but there was also the fact that I don’t particularly like talking on a cell phone, at least at length. It makes my ear sweaty. Having lived out here now for quite a while, sweaty ears are a given.

I realize that sounds like I’m making a big deal about cancelling a phone number, but added together with all the other trifling matters, it adds up to a fairly large trifle. And if you’ve ever tried to consume a large trifle, you’ll begin to understand my dilemma. (I love the oxymoronic notion of a large trifle. I’ll say it again, a large trifle.)

(editors note: Okay, Adrian, we get it.MM)

Of course, issues like that of the phone disconnect are mostly just a matter of waiting endlessly on hold listening to cheap elevator music, while you wait for someone to talk to. Not so with changing your doctor, however.

As you are probably aware, it is virtually impossible these days to sign up with a new family practitioner, so that was on the one hand. On the other hand, was my not wanting to drive two and half hours to visit my old GP in Toronto. I have had a lot of medical stuff hanging over me for the last couple of decades. I won’t go into them at this point, in fact I’ll probably spare you that all together in this piece. Suffice to say that, even though I had hardly ever seen my GP in person in years, it was still necessary to go to hospitals and clinics and such for testing and treatments on his referral. So, it became an item of some interest to get local help in that regard.

A great resource that exists in the rural areas are the nurse practitioners or NPs. They are registered nurses who, with additional training, have become mini-GPs. They can examine you, suggest treatments, make out prescriptions and, in my case almost as importantly, make referrals. Almost as hard to obtain as an actual GP, still they are out there and, most fortunately, through a friend of a friend, I was recommended to an NP in Campbellford. After a phone call during which I outlined all my bodily woes, she agreed to take Brooke and I on, no doubt reasoning that my problems alone would keep the office afloat during hard financial times.

After the phone call, an initial consultation was arranged, and I made the trip from Roseneath to Campbellford that would become a familiar drive in the coming months. A nice drive though, through more rolling hills and hamlets and only about twenty-five minutes in duration. The NP herself is a pleasant woman named Colleen who, it turns out, was interested in the theatre and even did a little herself at the little theatre in Cobourg.

I have ongoing conditions that, strangely enough, stayed the same even after moving to the country. I say strangely enough because I took it for granted that all people who lived in the country were preternaturally healthy and that it would somehow rub off onto me. This necessitates pharmaceuticals and that in turn requires a pharmacy within reach. The nearest to Roseneath that I could find was in Norwood, so that has become my go-too drug den. There was one in Hastings that was closer but the staff there were all surly the few times I went in and when you’re in need of drugs, the last thing you want is a moody dealer. So, Norwood it was.

Dentistry had to be changed too, and Brooke arranged that in Cobourg, although I have yet to go there. I’m a bit remiss when it comes to dentistry. I chalk that up to my English background. As you can probably tell, dentistry is an after-thought to the British. In fact, there are only three dentists in the entire country. It’s true.

(editor’s note: no, it’s not. MM)

Specialists were high on my list and again, travelling to Toronto for any sort of consult was not very agreeable. Unless you wanted to transit through the aforementioned Tenth Circle to get to the good ones. Most of which are in the downtown core. So now I am in the process of getting some new boys and girls to play with me. I have managed to get a referral for colonoscopies and will be getting my next one in Cobourg at the hospital there, again thanks to NP Colleen. And now I have a specialist in Peterborough (again with the Peterborough) that will deal with a skin issue I have. That issue is remarkable, so I will remark on it even though I said earlier I’d spare you this sort of thing.

Apparently, I am turning into a unicorn. There is what feels like a horn growing up through the centre of my head. I suspect it is much smaller than an actual horn, which Brooke confirms, but anything growing out of your head feels significantly larger than it is in reality. At any rate, Dr. Peterborough is going to remove it next month by freezing the top of my bonce and scraping it out. Queasy yet? I’ll stop now.

(editor’s note: You had me at ‘growing out of the top of my head.’ MM)

Now another one of my concerns about this medical transition to country mouse was the quality and experience of the hired help I was going to get. As it was, my original GP in Toronto was extremely well known and had extremely good contacts, so referrals in any field were sent to arguably the best in the business. Most of these super-doctors worked in the major Toronto hospitals and I was worried that if I totally transitioned to the country, I would lose my access to these superstars of the medical world.

But there was nothing to be done except to query friends although I found that few if any had the same issues I did. So now I wait for these various specialists to arise and ply their trade on me. I guess the unicorn specialist will be the first of these although my colonoscopy will come before that calendrically, and that specialist will be treating me from the other end. I’m an old hand at colonoscopies though (excuse the imagery) so no problem there, I figure. I hope. In fact, colonoscopies offer one of the best sleeps you’ll ever have when they put you out into the blackness that is anaesthetically induced unconsciousness. It’s all too short though, because no sooner are you waving goodbye to the smiling, waving team, than you are being nudged awake in the recovery room. I can’t say I mind the experience though. It’s the lead up to that procedure that takes its toll. All for a worthy cause though.

(editor’s not: ‘Calendrically?’ I didn’t even know that word existed. And I’m an editor! And even if it does exist, do you think other people will trust you enough to believe it exists without looking it up? MM)

SOCIALIZING WITH OTHER MICE          

It might be supposed that, when transitioning to country mouse, one might tend to become reclusive, to nestle down and preoccupy with home and hearth, to hang about the farm and do farmerly things. Turns out this is not necessarily the case as since we’ve been here, as mentioned, I have been quite engaged socially.

City mice, when becoming country mice, I figured, having shed the hubbub of the big smoke, would relish the solitary life of a country gentleman or lady. But no. In the theatre and film world, you are used to meeting a lot of people during the heydays of your career, both professionally and socially. As you get older, the frantic days of parties and openings become less and less frequent until, as happened to me, you choose not to get out too often. I suppose living in a large urban area such as Toronto also adds to this feeling of ‘once through the doorway, stay through the doorway.’

Out here, things are different. Quite a few of my fellow city mice had made the changeover in the past number of years and especially to this area where the rents and purchase prices were more actor-friendly and yet the distance to Toronto, our major hub of employment, was still doable. So, it became a thing, to contact these folks and we did and have hosted or been to a number of social occasions since moving. Art gallery openings, theatre, music events and dinner parties have also seen the mice gathered around cheese plates and wine bars, remembering the past or commenting on current rural events. Several of these have contained quite amazing coincidences. I shall tell you of one.

We were invited by friends of Brooke’s parents, Brad and Mary, to a sort of tea at the home of some mutual friends of friends of theirs. The friends were Al and Ethelwynn; the friends of friends were Harriet and Greg. We were all to meet at Greg and Harriet’s to go for a boat ride on Rice Lake and then have wine and cheese (cheese being the snack of choice amongst new-country mice) in their large and well-appointed newly built house on the side of a large hill overlooking the lake.

We all arrived on time and after some introductions and handing out of life-jackets and such, headed down to the boat dock to get ready for our ride. All of the time, I couldn’t help feeling that this Greg fellow looked mighty familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. We all got in the boat and even though it was a gusty day and cool, we decided to venture over the lake and up the small Indian River to the town of Keene. It was bumpy for part of the ride in the mid-sized bow-rider but warm enough despite the mid-fall weather. And there were blankets.

Once we were on the other side, Greg decided that he wanted to go for a water-ski down the river and donning his wet suit, he jumped in, gave a hearty shout and, Harriet driving the boat, we hurtled down the river while Greg tossed up spray all over the place. Again, as I watched him, his lanky figure cutting back and forth over the froth, I got this feeling of familiarity.

After he had clambered aboard and we had roared back across the lake, we made our way up to the house via a rather torturous uphill climb that made hay with my bad knees (did I mention my bad knees?) and we sat down for wine and tea in their voluminous living area. We gazed out over the lake, now quite calm, and wondered at the view and relative isolation of this idyllic spot of theirs.

Then came a time when we were encouraged to tell a little about ourselves to each other as newly-introduced city-turned-country mice sometimes do. Besides all the cheese was gone. When it came to Greg, he mentioned how he had grown up in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Now, other than Peterborough and Orillia, Richmond Hill had been where I also spent most of my teen years, attending Richmond Hill High School. I mentioned this and it became a rapidly escalating topic of interest since, as it turned out, Greg, too, went to Richmond Hill High (Caw Baw, yell and cheer, let the people know you’re here!) Not only that, but he went to school at exactly the same time I did. Now the blur of his semi-familiar face was starting to come into focus. Referring to his obvious athletic bent, as witnessed by his clever water-skiing at the age of seventy, I asked if he had done much in the way of athletics during these high-school years. I had done a lot of that sort of thing myself despite not being what you would call a ‘jock’ at that time. I was sort of an arts-jock.  But I could play most sports well and held local records in the javelin, the javelin being Greek enough to qualify as an art. Not many marble statues of naked men playing tennis. My other favourite sports pastime was football. And after playing for a year, I became one of the captains of the high-school team, specifically the defensive squad captain. Well, damn me if Greg didn’t also play football on the very same team only on the offensive side of the ball and was the back-up quarter-back! And damn me if I didn’t almost break one of his legs during a practice scrimmage one day.

I had totally forgotten this, of course, but not Greg. Greg admitted, half-jokingly, that he remembered that hit with great clarity and had been incensed at the time by the severity of the tackle. Apparently, he had been angry with me about that for years. To be fair, one isn’t really supposed to deck one’s teammates. But I wouldn’t have made captain without that enthusiasm. And now, here we sat, two old-guys, worlds apart and some fifty-five years later, face to face. He looked out the window and I wondered if he was pondering getting some sort of revenge. As his water-skiing had shown, I would be no match now with my bad knees (thanks, football) and a few glasses of excellent vintage Chardonnay under my belt. I couldn’t help but smile to myself at the thought of two old duffers rolling around on the immaculate pine floors of their mansion, him trying to settle an old score and me laughing until I threw up on the white shag rug. (I’m kidding, he didn’t have a white shag rug, but it helps with the imagery.)

But no, sadly, it didn’t come to that. We parted company a bit later with heartfelt promises all around to hook up later for further socializing. That never happened, at least up until now, and I wonder if its because of that severe tackle and the sound of his groans as they helped him up that I enjoyed so much so many years ago.

(editor’s note: Seems to me you might be enjoying that memory a bit too much, Adrian. Why not add some descriptive bone-crunching for good measure? MM)

 OUT WITH THE OLD

If we had actually ended up buying a house, we would probably, being the destitute artist types that we are, have had to get a ‘fixer-upper’. We’re both pretty handy, but some jobs would have been beyond us, such as interior electrics and structural repairs. To this we would probably have had to throw a fair amount of cash. But as Casa Loca wasn’t ours and Albert didn’t seem to be the type to invest money or labour into it, we had to do it ourselves and we were loathe to invest much money in it as we didn’t even know if we would be staying. However, we did have time and enthusiasm, so we ventured into a plan of limited renovation. We decided early on that we weren’t going to strip all the mismatching, fading and peeling wall papers off all the walls. Too much work and, again, it wasn’t our place to overhaul to that degree. We decided instead to fix the breaks and gaps in the plaster, peel off the paper that was falling off and leave the rest. We embraced the style that often occurs is European countries such as Spain or Italy that I call ‘Early demolition’. Here is a picture of the kind of thing I mean.

Old Spanishy deconstructed walls

Basically, it means cleaning, fixing the bare minimum and painting here and there. It sounds simple but it ain’t, I assure you. But once engaged, we were happy to step back now and then and see the transformation. I’m sure folks have taken on more daunting house make-overs, but probably not in a house they’re only renting. Let me take you on a tour.

THE TOUR

We’ll start in the basement. This was one of the last rooms to be worked on, but I’m going to start the tour from bottom to top. The Basement. I think I mentioned before about its suitability for a horror movie set so that’ll set the stage, I figure. The walls were wet and the dehumidifier that was plugged into the shaky wall-socket probably hadn’t been cleaned or serviced in years and moaned steadily while not producing any water out of the hose that hung into the sump pump well. To this date I still haven’t summoned the nerve to look down into the well of darkness. I think Brooke did once. Pools of water had accumulated, dried and accumulated again over that period. There were stacks of old furniture, paintings, a rickety shelf holding old stuff from a million years ago and at one end a ledge was open to the bare earth. And there were spiders, lots of them, clustered in webs and spider hotels on the beams made from old cedar trees. Jack posts supported the house, and the posts were found under large wooden beams that ran the length of the building and swayed downwards in the middle. I am going to use some pictures during this tour because as they say, “a picture is worth a thousand shudders.”

The Basement mid-horror

Personally, I found it hard to bring myself to go down there even when the lights in the kitchen blew and I was forced to go down to flip the breaker. But Brooke, the braver of us two, eventually ventured down there and did some preliminary cleaning and later we had a man come in and haul out some of the furniture and the paintings and such. We then moved the rickety wooden shelving structure out of the way and started, bit by bit, to occupy the room with benches and our saws and this past Christmas, I built a work bench against one wall as a present for Brooke. I know that sort of sounds like buying your wife an iron as a gift, but believe me, if you knew Brooke, you’d realize that wasn’t the case.

After we fixed the lighting a bit, we now have a workshop in a relatively sanitary and dry environment and is quite pleasant to work in. I wouldn’t say it was the hardest fix in the place, but it certainly was the grungiest. Here’s the result.

The Non-Horror Basement

 

Coming up the strange staircase with its definitely-not-to-code support system with its fading carpet runner and iron carpet holders, its bottom steps made out of cinder blocks and, of course, more spiders, one finds oneself in what we call the mudroom. It is a wide, narrow room leading from the back door to a sort of closet formed by a bulging piece of fake wood paneling. It has a counter with cupboards above that were filled with ancient tools, sprays and cow equipment and, for some bizarre reason, painted a dirty pink. By cow equipment I mean stuff like ear-tags and inserters and bags of rat poison for the barns. The ersatz cupboard was filled with old coats, many of them holding the remnants of mouse houses. This had to be cleaned out of course. I took on this job and together with our trusty shop-vac that we had bought, set about vacuuming up years of grime and, from the ceiling, vast highways of spider webs complete with tenants. Again, we threw out tons of detritus and bits and pieces of somebody else’s life, repaired the lighting and cleaned out the drawers and cupboards. We also installed a small freezer a bit later. Neither the basement nor the mudroom is heated.

The Mudroom

The kitchen, praise be to the kitchen gods, was in decent shape and when I first set foot in the place was the one room that made me think we stood a chance here. It’s pine panelling and plentiful cupboard space was easily cleaned up and it had some pretty nice old wooden furniture that suited the farmhouse vibe. Owing to the sway in the beams below, and as mentioned before, the kitchen is on a crazy slope. We’re used to it now, but I had my doubts that others would find it as forgiving on a night of drunken revelry. The fridge and stove were fairly new and just needed a cleanup. Other than that, the fridge leaked and sent a steady stream of water to the center of the room. In the end we fixed that by removing the back and cleaning out the drainage hoses leading from the freezer unit. Then we shimmed it up, so it was on a level playing field and now it’s perfectly fine. Here’s the kitchen as it looks now.

The Kitchen

The living room was another room that wasn’t in too bad a shape aside from the carpet being heavily stained, some mouse holes in the ceiling and what turned out to be an infestation of the aforementioned Lady Beetles. Those we vacuumed up and it became, as I said before, an ongoing battle for a couple of months. We extricated some of the old furniture, installed our own and threw down some area rugs.

Brooke is, amongst other things, a fabulous painter herself and we have, over time accumulated a lot of pictures, both of hers and other artists. There was scant enough room in the old apartment for these, but even less in this house. So, we decided to dedicate an entire wall at one end of the living room to this. We ended up with this.

The Living Room Panorama

The foyer and stairway up to the second floor was one of the first areas that we applied ourselves to in terms of paint and wall repair and some sort of design element. The banister up the stairs was hanging off the wall where it had been partially ripped out and protruded, held on by a couple of screws in non-anchored holes in the crumbling drywall. I considered leaving the banister as it was in case we ever wanted to get rid of some guests that were over-staying their welcome. In the end, we removed it, and I sanded and re-finished it outside. We repaired the walls around it and put it back on so that it now actually functioned as a handrail. We chose a bright yellow for the paint, and left the light fixture, and hung some pictures of old friend cats, now departed. Now it looks quite charming, don’t you think?

The 'Foyer'

 

The Staircase

The extra room downstairs that had been used as a bedroom after Albert’s wife, Renata, got sick, was a pleasant enough room given its palliative usage at the end. Without too much trouble we cleaned it up, deciding once again to go with the ‘dilapidated farmhouse’ look rather than remove every scrap of wallpaper. Besides, this wallpaper or rather wallpapers because there were many levels peaking out of the depths, wasn’t too bad. Muted designs of butterflies hovering over plants and such. Since it has a remarkably wide picture window in it, we decided to leave it as the master bedroom, a good choice as it turned out because waking up in the morning facing it and the bird-feeders has become quite a joy for us and especially the furry children. Although our appreciation of their bright plumage and feeding shenanigans isn’t exactly what the cats have in mind. As it turned out, it was sort of like cat television for them. The only drawback was that, at night, one could hear the scurrying of little mice toes around the walls. And later the more solid treads of the red squirrels that I think are hibernating somewhere in there. Those sounds pretty much ended though with the onslaught of winter.

The Bedroom

Marching up stairs you are confronted with a hallway running the length of the house and ending at a large window in a cubby at one end. This was where most of the outside life was getting in, so it became a priority to seal up and clean and attach a new blind. Brooke did an excellent job on this and now it is a nice little reading area with books and a comfortable rattan chair.

The Upper Hallway

To the right of that is what used to be the actual primary bedroom that has two of the only large closets in the house. Storage is an issue in this place, but no matter. Now it is Brooke’s art studio. We had transported her work bench and supplies from Toronto and after pulling up the fouled carpets and cleaning, once again, the bugs from the windows, it is now up and running and brimming with ideas; some in process, others hovering in the wings. 

Brooke's Studio

 To the left of the cubby is my office/studio. I had transported my large, antique oak desk from Toronto. Or rather, I watched as my two Iranian brothers transported it. Even with all the drawers out and the desktop removed, it still weighed a ton. How I ever got it up to the third floor back in Toronto, I’ll never know but it looks quite nice in its new home. It is here that I do most of my creative work as a writer, voice recording artist and animator. This use to be one of the boys’ rooms back in the day and I chose to leave some of their wallpaper up as it reminded me of my own sunny youth. It was this room that was the hardest to reconstruct in my opinion. Brooke may think differently. The wall needed much repair, and the disgusting orange shag carpeting had to be pulled up. This was after removing what seemed like hundreds of paintings stacked floor to ceiling on dusty and inhabited pieces of old furniture. But we made it happen.

The Office

I won’t go into the bathroom fixing-up here as they weren’t too bad really. The water pressure in the shower though is remarkable and compared to the pissy little drizzle that came out of the showerhead back in the apartment, it’s like standing under a hot Niagara Falls. The plumbing here is one of the bright lights. Tons of hot water under great pressure coming from a well that we’ve been told is 150 feet underground. Very pure and none of that sulphury smell.

And that brings us to the last of the interior highlights… the Vincent van Poe room. We had decided that this last small bedroom would be our ‘guest’ room. We also needed it to function as a video studio for us to be able to film our infrequent on-camera auditions when they arose. That meant being able to open up the space when necessary and to leave a blank wall against which to shoot the scenes.

Brooke had found a picture of Vincent van Gogh’s bedroom that he had painted in typical van Gogh fashion… bright yellows and oranges and reds and small rustic furniture. Brooke really went to town on this one. Once the usual hole and window repairs had been done and offending carpets removed, she painted the walls to resemble that of the painting. Then we bought a fold out couch/bed, and she bought the required bedding in colours that suited the painting. It then remained to hunt around the antique stores and used furniture outlets in the area to find the bits and pieces needed to fill out the picture. This we did and amongst other things found the perfect old chair that she re-conditioned or ‘old-conditioned’ if you like to resemble the only other piece of furniture in van Gogh’s room besides a small wooden table and the bed of course. Then came the ‘Poe’ part of it.

Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven became a secondary theme for some reason I can’t remember. I think because the way the wall was reconstructed resembled the masonry death of the victim in The Cask of Amontillado. I had an old stuffed crow thing that we put on the outside of the door and where pictures in van Gogh’s bedroom could be seen in the painting, we put various paintings of crows and ravens. The whole thing seemed to come together at this point, hence The Vincent van Poe Room. Poe Room for short.

The Vincent van Poe Room

 And there you have it. There is more I could write about all this and probably will but, for the time being, I have completed my 15,000-words-in-a-month challenge as set out by the Roseneath Writer Circle, which I joined some months ago. More about this fine group of fellow writers later.

For now, signing off, Adrian Truss