AT A GLANCE:

I have been excited about the possibility of listing the marvellous limestone home at 25 Wellington St since late fall. Without wanting to tempt fate I mentioned it (in hushed reverential tones) to a few colleagues and friends. I wandered past. This is before the first snowfalls. I re-read its history (the same family has owned it, tended to its needs, lavished attention on it, since 1963), and I pictured myself on its grand staircase, or on the narrow stairs down to the basement (where the kitchen used to be). And when the contract was mine, I began to strategize, and to pull the threads together, to fill the rooms with flowers. It is an exciting listing for me, and perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime possibility for you.

At the western edge of Benson Lake, which is part of the Rideau System and connects to Indian and Mosquito and Loon and Newboro, and also to Chaffeys Locks, a much-renovated and four-season home or cottage with its own boat launch.

A stupidly, head-shakingly pretty house on Main Street, Wolfe Island. The only worry here is that it will spoil you for anything else.

The seller subscribes to a wabi sabi approach to both renovation and life, a celebration of simplicity and impermanence, a delight in patina and roughness, aging and imperfection, asymmetry and process. Consider me hooked.

You move in upstairs and every morning pinch yourself, or throw yourself in the pool, whatever it takes to make sure you’re not dreaming. Your mum and dad are living downstairs and you’re surprisingly okay with that. Or the kid is, while he’s at college, and you swear you can hear two voices down there this morning, laughing and shushing each other. Lovebirds, is the word that comes to mind. Life is rich, and you’ve hit the jackpot.

I walked these 98 acres with the seller back in the fall and haven’t stopped thinking about them since. I went over again last week to strap a sign to the gate. I clambered down to the shoreline other side of the road, dug shards of pottery from the cliff, stared south (a little sadly) towards America. Afterwards I walked to the pond near the back of the land and marvelled at the variety of landscapes I’d moved through. There was something surreal about the experience, as if I was as likely to run into cheetah or hyena as I was tweeted birder. I could breathe better, and think more clearly. I wanted to both laugh and cry, sleep and run.

EAST COAST / WEST COAST

My daughter is flying home from Los Angeles this afternoon. As I write this, Flight Tracker has her 10,680m over southern Utah. She’ll be back in Canada in a bit over three hours. None of this is particularly noteworthy outside my own skull, except that I’ve been reading a lot this week about how ICE agents have now been deployed in several American airports. So I’ve been worried. My daughter’s passport and her skin colour mean she’s at very little risk. I get that. And it’s obscene, of course, that we can’t all say the same thing.

I’ve mentioned this so-lovely Hayden song before. Its rolling piano like a tide coming in, its deserted airport scenes so early morning, so drowsy and silky, so post-apocalyptic. The music and the lyrics and the video all slay me. You add to that mix a kid a few thousand miles away and it was a very contemplative, sigh-full coffee I sipped this morning in the window of my apartment, a fire-striped maple bug struggling mightily to climb the glass away from me and my anxieties.

RECENTLY SOLD

MUSINGS