This week tell us about the places you've called home. Have you lived in one place all your life? Tell us about it and why you've chosen to stay there. Have you lived in many places? Where have you lived and what have you done to make each place feel like home? What has been your favorite place to live and why?
In my life there have been many, many moves! This may become quite long ... you are warned!
I was born, what feels like aeons ago, in Saint John, New Brunswick. We lived in a few homes before my parents built a big red house on Kelton Street. Funnily enough, almost forty years later I moved into a neighbourhood in Oakville and one of the little girls who lived across from us on Kelton Street was one of my neighbours - four doors down the road! The world truly is small sometimes!
When I was four, we moved to Boston when my Dad was accepted into the MBA program at Harvard. We lived in the married student housing in Watertown. Two years later, degree in hand (or, to be more precise, degree in Grampy's hand because my dad would have left it somewhere!) we moved to Cleveland, Ohio, I seem to recall it being a small ranch house in a town called Meadowbrook or Meadowvale Village. Two vivid memories: breaking the neighbours picture window with a boomerang recently brought home by one of the dads from Australia; and, the snapping turtles which lived in the pond across the street from the bus stop. At the time it was the cheapest place to live in the US and still be in reasonable commuting distance to the big cities in the North East. We then moved to Toronto and lived in a lovely home on Strathallan Boulevard in the Avenue Road and Lawrence area. (I would dearly love to live back there but I'd have to be married to someone else!) We then moved to Chicago, the suburb of Palentine on a 15 acre farm with an awesome basketball court in the barn and a pool! Back to Canada and another house in Toronto. This is the house my father considers our family home. An old, character home in Forest Hill, originally built in 1913. It was a behemoth 10,000 square foot, 3 storey, yellow brick house on a corner lot. It came with an incredible regulation size snooker table in the basement, I swear the house was built around it.
Alas, puberty hit and I was no angel. Can you imagine? I was then off to boarding school in St. Thomas, Ontario (just outside of London). I was sent with great hopes that I just might squeak by with a high school diploma. I'm happy to say I ended up valedictorian. Then off to Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Truly, the coldest place on earth. When the wind comes over the marshes and blasts you, there is NOTHING more bone chilling. Much rye was consumed in an effort to keep warm. I'm sticking with that story. Though, it's entirely possible Sackville has never recovered from my presence!
My career began. I worked in West Seneca (Buffalo), New York and moved into various apartments and houses in the eight years I went through the longest management training program in the history of mankind! Enough with all that training, time to put it to the test. I took a transfer to Calgary, Alberta. I lived in a tiny townhouse, but since I really lived at the office it didn't matter. Then I bought my first house. A real house all my own, with a front and back yard and all that goes with it! I bought the house a year before we got married. I got married and had two babies in that little blue bungalow on 7A Street. It was cramped and small but it was home.
Louis took a transfer to the Toronto office and we moved to Oakville, a suburb located just outside Toronto to the west on the shores of Lake Ontario. Since moving here in 1997 we have lived in three communities: we first moved to a big "white elephant" in Glen Abbey, moved to River Oaks with the best neighbours ever and now have settled in Bronte.
Please let this be our last home. I tease Louis that the only way he's getting me to leave is in a casket. But it's true! This is a lovely home. It has high ceilings, wood floors, huge windows and sits on the shore. We have balconies out each floor and the deck runs around the back half of the house. The look is very formal when you walk up to the front door. Inside it is a casual beach house. The colours are very rich and earthy which was a fantastic reprieve from our long, bleak winter! I was really concerned that I went too heavy in my selections when we moved in last Spring, but it turned out great. It's still a work in progress. We have an empty dining room (in all these moves I still haven't found one I like). But, it's coming along.
It will be a reflection of us ... all of us, crazy, hectic, warm and happy.
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