I’d hoped to write much more than I have the past six or seven weeks. But the attention span just isn’t there. The drive to sit down at a desk for hours and to sustain a mood, a space. And so I’m settling for these wind sprints. Settling isn’t the right word, perhaps. I like this exercise of linking a narrative to an image. Of trying to have it feel real and alive. To take on unfamiliar voices and place them front and centre on a site that’s supposed to sell houses.

We’ve all settled by now into new (and completely alien) routines. Some of us are handling it better than others. Some of us despair, and some of us never want to go back. We all agree, though, that it’s pretty damn weird out there.

Here are our latest thoughts on the essential service designation granted to realtors. We think that people should be staying home except in urgent circumstances. The ground is shifting under our feet every day is how it feels, and this is no time for complacency.

Sadiqa de Meijer has a new collection of poems - The Outer Wards. And it’s something special. I’ve had it on the arm of a favourite chair for a couple of weeks now. It reminds me of what I’m missing out there on the streets of this very special neighbourhood.

I listened a lot to Baxter Dury’s dad, Ian, back when I was a kid trying to hang tough in a village just outside Oxford. If you’d told me then how forty years I’d be a million miles away listening to this stuff and flogging houses, I’d have looked at you funny.

Christ, so much has changed in the last few weeks. Hell, the last few hours. I think often these days on how all over the world we’re sitting around our kitchen tables with our kids and/or our loved ones every night and having pretty much exactly the same conversation.

I’ll get right to the point. Cheri and I will not be showing any more houses, or listing any more houses, until this crisis eases. We just don’t think there are safe ways to conduct business at the moment. And we think that unless there is some absolutely critical reason you have to buy or sell, then you should sit out this spring market.

When I was a kid my parents often took me and my sisters over to Shotover Hill on weekend mornings, not far from where we lived in Oxfordshire. It’s an ancient forest and hill, with a decent view of the shire. A Royal Forest too, whatever that is, until the 17th Century. And when they were in season, we’d pick blackberries up there.

The Everly is Kingston’s newest downtown restaurant. And one of its best. A midcentury theme and an impressive menu has transformed an old bank building, softening the space into something resembling the room you’d eat in every day in if you could.

The snow is throwing itself around outside the office window. And while we should be filing paperwork and proofing copy, instead we’ve been playing each other songs and videos from our youth.

I got another “Property Evaluation Certificate” in the mail today. You know the ones, probably, with the faux gold seal, and the ornate border like that on a bank note, and the suggestion that you “keep this valuable certificate with your important documents … if for some reason you do not wish a property evaluation at this time.” I’m not happy about it.

I never expected, at any moment in my first sixteen years, to fly into Mississauga one wet night in 1980, and have to find somewhere to live. Or to end up decades later a realtor at the other end of Lake Ontario. But shit happens and this is my best reading of how.

Here’s how I feel about the real estate business and the neighbourhood as we push away from 2020’s dark starting line. There are forecasts and updates, hope and despair. It’s got it all, this one.

See, to my mind, the above isn’t a vacant one-bedroom apartment at all, whatever the listing says, even if that copy does caution that “improvements” might be needed. That, my friend, is just a really wet cinder block basement with some pretty ominous dangling electrical. The sort of room Keanu Reeves fights his way out of during a career slump. 

There are burn marks about head-height on the inside of the grey shower curtain of this shabby Toronto hotel. Someone smoked in here is my guess, and the water pressure is low - more a damp, warm drizzle than the righteous downpour I was looking for after my late night and early morning.

The fierce wind this week in Kingston brought down far more fences than it did trees. I sleep high in the house, right under the rafters, and was intermittently alarmed. While I sought more sleep, huddled under cold sheets, the force of that wind arrived in my mind’s eye as a series of pale grey shadows crowding me into a corner of the bed. It was a jostling rather than a face.

I was in New York City recently. Cheri was minding the shop. I feel guilty leaving work behind (stupid of me, I know), but Cheri had her own excursion south a few weeks further back, and even completed a deal from the Grand Canyon, her phone held high in the air like some lighter at a rock concert. It was my turn, I told myself. A chance to actually talk to the kids, to notice all the ways in which they’ve grown.

The spring is usually our busiest season, but not this year. Things started more slowly than normal and I wondered if we’d ever recover to our normal level. I fretted, in fact. And paced. But the last six weeks have been the busiest of our year, and there is no sign of things slowing down. We have three new listings coming this week.

There will come a day when I don’t make the walk up to the Sunday Market at the Memorial Centre. It’s inevitable. The knees will give out, or the mind. Conceivably we move into another neighbourhood (once the kids have left home), or out beside a quietly muscular river north of the city. All good things come to an end, you realise.

There is no website for Wok-In, a tiny Asian restaurant on the west side of Montreal St, between Princess and Queen, and I’m okay with that. Because if you set up some snazzy one-pager on Squarespace, load the bottom with honest reviews, I’d likely never get in there again. The line-ups would begin at dawn.