Embracing Change: Our Family’s Journey to a New Home

OMG OMG we are moving! More on where we are going later, today I’m focused on the why. As I re-read what I wrote below I have noticed that this post is very long, and gushy, and riddled with run-on sentences.  Maybe you stumbled on my blog and you don’t want to read my stream of consciousness outpour of love for our current home, and especially the garden, so please don’t feel obliged to. I’m not sure why I shared some of what I did below, but it came out of me and I decided not to edit it out. That is hard for me. I view this blog as both a diary and creative outlet for my thoughts, and want to use it as a means to return to writing.

If you want to skip out on the long winded thoughts below, you can stop reading here and just take away from this post that we are moving, and someday soon I will write about where to. The rest of this post is about the place we are leaving behind. 

This face is an excited face

When our two older kids were about 7 and 9 they spent a lot of time in school discussing social media and the idea of a digital footprint, and we talked at length about it at home. They asked me not to post pictures of them on social media anymore without getting their permission, and to turn my YouTube channel with baby and toddler videos of them to private mode. I thought long and hard about that, and the glimpses of our lives I had shared with somewhat unknown people up until then, and I listened to my kids. At that age they helped me to realize that I have nothing to gain by sharing and publicizing aspects of our lives on social media, and I stopped. I enjoy my privacy, and I keep details of my life known only to immediate family and close friends. It works for me. The post below is for me, not for an intended audience, but it is here nonetheless, because I miss writing and I have always wanted to start a blog, and I think that will inevitably touch on honest thoughts pouring out of my head, and if it gets personal, I am ok with that. 

Ode to a house

This was our COVID home. Our front garden began its transformation during lockdown. This was the home our oldest children were locked-down in, where we homeschooled them, and where they now bring their friends and enjoy their return to a normal childhood in. This was the home our youngest came home from the hospital to, and where we became a family of 5. This was the home where the kids learned how to cook eggs, pancakes, cookies and grilled cheese. We have a height chart notched into a doorframe of their years here.

This was also the home I was living in when I was diagnosed with a life-altering condition. Our garden was my way of coping, and the joy, love and strength I found in plants  helped me transform into the new version of myself I am today. This was the home where I experimented with so many ways of growing and propagating plants, and fell in love with growing vegetables, flowers, bushes and trees from seed.

We have spent the last few years creating our garden. We have experimented with landscaping, soil amendments, plant growing, garden design and building out some pretty kick-ass pathways all throughout our garden. We’ve transformed this space into an outdoor oasis maximizing every inch of green space, finding non-traditional ways to create a thriving and beautiful little urban nature oasis in what was previously a neglected weedy front yard, an unwanted barren side yard, and a backyard so small our kids couldn’t do anything in. 

I’ve waited patiently for 3 years for the grapevines I planted to crawl over the roof of our pergola and spread out into a canopy of grape leaves and clusters of grapes we can reach out and pick in late summer while enjoying their shelter from both sun and rain. This year we sprawled out our vegetable garden into every part of our yard, and grew enough vegetables to avoid buying produce from May until now, still, at the end of October when peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, potatoes, broccoli, kale, squash, beets, celery, radishes, melons and cauliflower are still plentiful enough for constant harvests.

We incorporated these vegetables into our garden planning in every part of our yard, and they grew in harmony with native and pollinator friendly plants, as well as annuals planted for companion purposes, all over our property. They mixed into a beautiful and eye-pleasing landscape, and we had plenty to enjoy, share with neighbours, as well as visiting and nesting wildlife. They also taught us so much about how they like to grow best, as we tested out different soils, light conditions, companion plants and growing methods.

Our garden has become a somewhat unexpected wildlife haven. A family of robins nests here every year. We have squirrel nests in our hedges, and rabbits living under our trees shaded by tall shrubs. We have birds, bees and butterflies visit us all year round, and we never need to put seeds out in bird feeders anymore because the food they seek is abundant on our property, in any season. We gratefully share it with them. We have hammocks, benches, rain shelter and a beautiful sun patio all surrounded by plants, interspersed with vegetables and flowers where we can watch our garden visitors from. This is my current view from one such places as I write this.

It’s fall, and it doesn’t look as pretty now as it did in spring or summer, but there are so many seeds, dried flower heads and berries surrounding me, and the birds and squirrels and bunnies and bees and butterflies have lots of food to forage for here, and their harvest will continue all winter long, so they return.

Sometimes they stay. We have spaces for them to nest, build winter stockpiles, and find shelter from the elements. We leave leaves all winter long as shelter and habitat for the critters under them, and those leaves naturally break down and enhance our soil in the spring so our plants have more of the nutrients they need.

I have loved every moment of creating this space, and this year for the first time I have time to sit and enjoy it, and marvel in our beautiful harvests from this little patch of land, in the middle of our quiet suburban street. 

Often times our neighbors stop to talk to me when I’m working in the garden, and compliment and ask about our space. We’ve helped inspire and guide several yard and small space transformations on our street, and among our friends, and I’ve enjoyed sharing the knowledge we’ve acquired and helping others put it to use.

So why move?

When we first started talking about moving, I couldn’t handle the thought of leaving this garden we’ve created, which we’ve worked so hard on. This year we finally achieved our goal of getting rid of all our grass by tackling the last portion of our yard, our dreaded side-garden. It will start coming into its own next year, and I wanted to be here to witness that. I didn’t want to leave it behind.

Slowly, the thought of moving started seeping through my brain, making it’s way into my  thoughts on what to have for breakfast, when I folded laundry, in the car on my way to a hockey, soccer or swimming practice (kids, not me). 

Truthfully, our house is perfect for our family. It’s been perfect since we bought it, it’s more than large enough for all of us, it’s close to everything, and we really haven’t needed to do anything to improve it inside. 

That is my very long winded context to where we live, and how happy we’ve been here for the past 5 years. So why would we ever thing of moving?

The thing is, C and I love projects. We live for projects. Any kind, really, as long as they involve tools, dirt, and manual labour of some sort, we are in. We bicker from start to finish but we make an amazing team and we create amazing things because of how we compliment each other. And we love getting the kids involved

He is an engineer with an incredible planning brain and meticulous eye for detail and budgetary constraints. I am a “free spirit” artist overflowing with creative ideas, unable to constrain myself or stick with a medium, always searching for something new to create, and unique ways to do it.  When we put our heads together and envision something, it consumes both of us until it’s done. Then we high five and start dreaming up our next project. And that next one is usually bigger and bolder and better than the last. We call this our “more”. We live our life always on the lookout for our next “more”.

There is no “more” here. We’ve done everything we wanted, and anything new we could come up with to tackle here would seem smaller than what we’ve already achieved, and would be done with existing skills and knowledge, with nothing new for us to learn, no need tools for us to try, no mistakes to make and have to fix a long the way. That isn’t our “more”.

So we went looking for “more” in a new home, and spent 6 months searching, then we finally found it. Or rather, it found us, and haunted us until we managed to figure out how to make it work for us. We get possession of our “more” home in 6 days. I will follow this post with another on the new place later.

For now, our little oasis is sold, and this home will hopefully be as loved and enjoyed by the new family that owns it as it has been by us.

But all of these things are in the past. As a family, we have experienced life altering moments in this house, and we are now packing what we need in boxes, purging many things we don’t need, and looking forward to the next chapter in our lives, leaving behind a piece of ourselves in the garden that will hopefully continue to grow as we had intended when we built it.

This is also the home where together, as a family, we dreamed up what we want from our new “more” home, and the home Localeaf was dreamed up in. This is the home where I am about to register us as an official, incorporated legal business, which our “more” home will allow us to bring to life.

I just have to figure out how to bring a few choice plants I have divided and plucked from our current garden with me, along with my year old seedlings and baby trees. On last count I had 187 potted plants coming with me.