The cocktail hour!

It has been some time since I have felt quite as chuffed about our current circumstances as I now do!  It is a blustery rainy day in the Town of Mississippi Mills in the Country of Lanark and Province of Ontario but we are insensible of the weather – except to rejoice that we now have a screen door installed on the balcony door through which the otherwise unpleasing north wind may howl thankfully (it’s a summertime thing). The singular chap who by design works every day of the week for six months of the year (before retiring to the South Pacific for the winter) attended upon us as promised to assess the request for a screen door installation.  We hadn’t anticipated that he would complete the installation today.

BlueSky Screen Systems

Contemporaneously with the tradesman’s attendance we too in his wake were labouring nonstop to complete the removal of whatever remained in boxes from our move last November on the other side of the Mississippi River to here. It was truly a drudgery, pure donkey work.  Yet the result is supreme satisfaction!  We have in the process elevated ourselves from the melancholy of moving to the spectacle of requited endeavour.

The only time I recall having enjoyed the moving process was when I transitioned from my first little house on St. George Street to our large subdivision house on Laura Crescent.  It was a time when I had so few possessions to move and so many rooms in which to deposit them that it was by comparison to today’s effort the dissolution of a drop of oil upon the sea.  The only other less burdensome move was when I removed my possessions from my shared apartment on Spring Garden Road in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the end of the academic year while attending law school.  I decided to sell everything to a used furniture dealer. The dealer arrived at the apartment to investigate. When I asked what he’d give me for my stuff, he told me I owed him fifty dollars.

The upshot of today’s exhaustive undertaking is that I have more than metaphorically determined my ultimate departure from this or any other worldly venue.  In short, I am done with moving! The process from beginning to end is far too draining to anticipate having to repeat.  I am not so irrational as to imagine that by misfortune of health or capacity I may be required to displace myself to a care home of some description if I haven’t the courtesy to die; otherwise, this is it. For the first time in my life I am acquainted with a corporate landlord of whom I have every expectation of perpetual existence. Even considering the possible eventuality of bankruptcy of the landlord the prospect of enforced removal is virtually non-existent. And barring delinquency in payment of the feudal estimates, the legislature of Her Majesty in right of the Province of Ontario is not likely to amend its current prohibition against tenant ejection (with or without contractual arrangement).

There is unequivocally no diminishing the smug comfort of knowing that whatever ownership battles attend occupancy of the real property, help is as close as one’s phone. We are gifted to have the extraordinarily attentive care of Jared Laginski of Inverness Homes and Kim Matthew of Tulip Property Management. It may perhaps be dismissed as the stock absorption of the agèd to escape the exigencies of ownership of real property but I can assure you that for us it is no small compliment or complement! As I muttered at table this evening, we are once again at liberty to devote ourselves exclusively to the enjoyment of life. It is, I find, a misguided pleasure to persist in holding onto what are the inevitable and irksome necessities of property ownership. These sometimes rigorous obligations are more germane to the hale and hearty. And to have the additional ease of knowing  one can in these circumstances secure what amounts to perpetual existence is a welcome constitution.