In the early days of the pandemic, I secured a handkerchief to my face, using hairbands to attach it to my ears, and, in this makeshift mask (the real ones hadn’t yet arrived on the scene), went to go look at a house. A couple challenging months later (the whole lockdown in a one bedroom with a toddler thing, plus an excruciating wait for potentially dire but ultimately a relief coin-toss-type genetic testing results) and now this house is sort of… it. This house, this block, the walk to and from the daycare, the preferred fruit stand.
For reasons disappointing to discourse (a husband good at astrophysics, not a secret mountain of family money, or else why wait until one’s mid-late 30s to own a home; also, the thing where I work), I am now a homeowner, which is to say, money goes to a mortgage rather than a landlord. A lucky switch I am pleased with, except for the occasions when I remember that between this and daycare, I am now substantially less free with money than I was when living in NYC on a sub-$30k graduate stipend. (I recently splurged on a pair of mid-range short-person sweatpants, but the agonizing that preceded it! And when I think of what I once spent on a handbag when in Paris to do research, “research” being possibly a euphemism for eating croissants and spending 200 euros on a handbag.) But our rent was going to go up anyway, so.
Similarly: the cost of all this makes the house in many ways less customizable than a teen bedroom or dorm room. Responsible adulthood, what a thing.
For the first few months, it seemed utterly bizarre to me that I lived in a house. A house! Where were the upstairs or downstairs neighbors? (Next door ones, yes, obviously. It’s a house but not exactly rural.) How do I have stairs? The only familiar part is there being just one bathroom, a situation that becomes increasingly hmm at times such as: additional human being using the toilet, or, when I was pregnant and needed to scale Everest every 5 minutes. But such is the trade-off for non-squalor in Toronto.
It was this or a two bedroom two bathroom condo situation and elevators seemed not so appealing in early-plague times. I was forever pressing the button of our apartment building’s elevator with my elbow and accidentally ending up on the wrong floor, only noticing this when I got to the door of the apartment in our line on that floor. Because of my aversion to that (and the in-elevator aerosols), it is now an occasion to get the stroller in and out of our home, with all the stairs it involves. But still, for the best! This is the toddler-and-baby village, and allow me the parental overshare that my toddler is friendly and sociable, so this is rather key.
My understanding of city houses, though, came from growing up in Manhattan, where they mean something different, in terms of cost and size. I remember a classmate’s house that had 6 floors. (That family went on to deal with unthinkable tragedy so I have since un-jealoused myself.) Another classmate’s townhouse had its own elevator, which I only learned when I was trying to figure out why this strange acquaintance wanted me to come into a closet with her, and then we emerged on another floor. In Toronto, a house is, or can be, basically NYC-apartment-sized, but on different levels. It took me a few minutes to realize that, while more space than the one-bedroom, this is not in fact Downton Abbey. It is, instead, a classically Toronto house, which is to say, it looks like the ones in Queens seen from overhead in the “All in the Family” intro. At least I no longer do the thing where I involuntarily hum the theme song whenever on a residential street in this city.
Houses are terrifying. Who knows what’s going on inside them? Is the basement about to flood? The roof to cave in? The walls filled with undetectable, odorless, but extremely toxic mold? There’s no one keeping track! It took about a year of living here for me to not assume these sorts of things were randomly imminent. For the price of a house in a normal American town it is possible to have one’s Toronto basement “finished” which is something to perhaps look into when I sell a book deal about Britcoms for the trillion dollars such a thing is doubtless worth. When that day comes, I will start by installing a second bathroom, then buy these sweatpants in every (appealing) color they come in, and do whatever the thing is where you pay for a full week of sleep.
Does said house have a yard of sorts?
#sameAsItEverWas