Whew. It’s been a week—a month—a season—a year. Fall’s a third over, but it’s flown by. A month ago we returned from Japan, and turned in short order to packing up the apartment. We moved this week, and we’re so glad for it.
Byward was wearing us down. I love the area, but the city seems determined to keep it from its potential as a dense, livable core. We couldn’t go anywhere without crossing a river of cars, and the noise—SO MUCH NOISE—, the worst of it vehicular, had seeped deep into us. Our building and unit were lovely, but it was time to go. (To be clear, that makes me really sad! I really do love the area, and its potential. But it’s getting neither the vision nor support it and its residents—all its residents—need, and I don’t see that changing for a while. Relatedly / unrelatedly, it doesn’t even have a produce market anymore!)
We’ve moved to a familiar neighbourhood. Still close to our favourite spots (we’ve already done a Perfect Books run!), but a bit out from the hustle and bustle. It’s been a load off the mind and body to take morning and evening walks, enjoying the changing leaves and taking the area in from a new perspective.
We’re living in an older house now, a little one from the 40s. Renting, to be clear—we don’t have anywhere near the kind of money to buy a house these days. I struggled with a few things, saying goodbye to the familiar and hello to the new, one of them being how an older house isn’t nearly as sealed up as the fifth-floor, concrete-encased, 20-year-old apartment we’d been living in. We’re not the only being living in and around it, in other words. My therapist had a good perspective on this, though, pointing out how the house “grows” things, versus the sterile nature of an apartment at a remove from the ground—with greater potential for us to grow here, too, I hope.