Tag: environmentalism

Seven Things – no, Eight – I Love about Our New House

August 6, 2016

 

We’ve been here two months next week. Here’s what I love about the new house.

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  1. Its location. I’ve written about this before, so I’ll keep this short. I can walk or bike to the university’s arboretum, which alone gives me a 6 km walk if I do the perimeter paths alone, and a lot more if I wander the interior trails…and it’s an easy connect to the city’s multi-use trail system, which takes me downtown, or up to the big north-end park, or further out to the lake. Or along the river system, east, west, or north. I can also walk or bike easily to grocery stores, two butchers, a seasonal local-produce stand, and all the shops and services I could want.
  2. The recreation centre that’s about 250 metres away. Which includes a 25 metre pool, where I’m learning to swim again; a fitness centre, an excellent library, billiard rooms, bocci and tennis courts, concert and theatre venues, and lots of other activities to participate in, should I choose to.
  3. Air conditioning! It’s a hot and humid summer. The previous house didn’t have air conditioning; it kept cool with huge old shade trees and windows open at night, but it would have struggled this summer. We use it judiciously, but we appreciate having it here.
  4. The natural gas barbecue. No propane tanks to buy and change and take back. We’ve barbecued more here in the last month than I think we did in the last house in the past five years. (This is related to reason 6, too.)
  5. New construction. Our previous house was built in 1911. This one was built in 1998. Its windows fit, its doors fit. Floors are flat. It has good insulation. I dusted today for the first time in two months, whereas the old house – well, you dusted, and a few hours later you wondered why you’d bothered.
  6. No mosquitoes! OK, it’s a very dry summer. But it hasn’t stopped the mozzies at the other house, which is rural and in an area with a lot of maple swamps. Here, there’s the occasional one, but I can go outside to pick herbs and tomatoes without insect repellent, which wasn’t the case before.
  7. The city it’s in. I’m hugely biased: I lived here for sixteen years, between 1978 and 1994, before we moved a bit further south to make our commutes do-able. I always wanted to come back – but there was good reason for that. I’ve talked about the trail system, but to that I can add beautiful parks along the rivers, a good arts centre, one of the best bookstores in the world with welcoming writers’ community, some wonderful old architecture, the university’s library, music performances and theatre, the year-round farmer’s market, the best-behaved off-leash dogs I’ve met outside of Paris, and a strong local-food movement. All the things that make a city livable, for me.
  8. The community-within-the-city. Friendly, welcoming neighbours who balance that friendliness with respect for personal space and choices about lifestyle and involvement in community activities.

The biggest thing we’ve had to get used to (again) is paying for water. We’ve been on our own well for the last twenty-two years, and while we were always careful during other drought summers, the water was, essentially, free, although of course there was pump maintenance and replacement, as well as water-tank replacement in those years, and the electricity to run the pump. (Sometime I’ll do the arithmetic on that and see which one was, in the long run, more expensive!) Here, not only do we pay for water use, but we are bound by water restrictions – the city uses groundwater, and in a dry summer like this one we are limited to which days and which hours we can water flowerbeds; lawns are out of the question. I have no problem with that at all – essentially it’s no different than what we did with our own well. I’m not complaining about either paying for water (we should) or the restrictions (necessary and responsible): it’s just the one thing that wasn’t on our radar for the last twenty-two years.

So, when people ask me do I miss the old house, the honest answer is no. It was time to move. I’m glad we did.

Raking Leaves

November 1, 2015

The winds that brought in a cold front a couple of days ago also brought down almost all the leaves hanging on to our two Norway maples. Norway maples – Acer platanoides – have, as their scientific name indicates – huge, plate-like leaves, and they don’t decompose easily. I have a couple of choices – I can rake them onto a tarp, and move them to the edge of the maple swamp behind us, in a (useless) attempt to smother the goutweed that someone planted there, long before our tenure in this house. Or I can mulch them into small fragments, and leave them to enrich the lawn. Burning isn’t an option – that requires a burn permit (if you’re at all law-abiding, anyhow) – and on our small property there is nowhere that meets the criteria.

I choose to mulch them into the lawn with the electric lawnmower. But first I have to rake them away from the porch, and the shrubs, and the garage doors where the wind has pushed them. It’s a cool last day of October, and this is just the right thing to be doing. Last year I was still on post-surgery restrictions, and the years before that I was working, gone from the house from dark to dark, and it seemed to rain every weekend. So for some years a landscape service has taken care of our leaves. But this year, it’s all mine, and I’m reveling in it.

I rake the leaves onto the front and side lawns into more-or-less even drifts, and plug in the mower. I start with the mower set at 3 1/2 inches, and go over the leaves, dropping the mower height down as the leaves are chopped. Across the road, a neighbour with a much larger property is burning hers: the smell takes me back to childhood, when we all burned leaves: the scent of fall.

It takes me about an hour and half to do the front and side lawns, clean the mower, sweep bits off the driveway and the walks. The leaves have been reduced to tiny fragments that will decompose easily, returning their nutrients to the soil, feeding earthworms and micro-flora, strengthening the grass and clover that make up our lawn.

There is something that just feels right about taking care of what we own ourselves, instead of paying a service to do it. I draw the line at the highly specialized or dangerous (BD and I are having a debate about our very tall chimney, which needs repointing. I think it’s too tall for him to do; he thinks otherwise. I point out we only re-shingled the one-storey additions and the garage ourselves, summer jobs, and left the high roof of our three-storey house to the professionals. And the chimney is higher than that roof. He’s ‘thinking about it’.) But raking leaves, cutting the grass, pruning…and inside, cleaning, painting, repairing….I like doing these, and they connect me to my house and my garden. I prefer to be a steward, with all the responsibility that implies, than a occupant, leaving the responsibility to others. Too often, in our working days, we felt more like occupants, renting services to keep the place going.

It rained heavily last night, so I can’t mulch more leaves today. I’ve still got twice as much to do – the other side lawn and the back, the the leaves from one Norway maple and a host of other, smaller-leaved trees – but that’s ok. The weather is promising to be warm all this coming week (unseasonably so, actually) and I have the time now. I’ll wave at neighbours, chat over the fence, watch the chickadees completely ignore me as they go back and forth to the feeders. What better way to spend a sunny, early November day?

Old, Cold Houses

October 29, 2015

Yesterday it rained all day, heavily, the last gasp of Hurricane Patricia reaching up into the edge of Canada. Today the winds blew hard, gusting to about 90 km/hr, bringing a cold front with them, and stripping most of the remaining leaves from the trees.

Parts of the house are cold tonight.  A four-square built in 1911, it’s grown a bit from the original; a summer kitchen renovated to a rec room in the sixties; the attic made into living space sometime earlier than that; our own addition of a sunroom.  Insulation didn’t exist originally and was minimal when added sometime later.  The windows aren’t quite sealed.  We’ve added pink fibreglas and vapour barriers in all the places we’ve stripped the walls down to the beams, and in the new sunroom.  The rest of the house had insulation blown into the walls a few years ago.  It helps.  It doesn’t make the house completely airtight, and on a day like this, bits of it are cold.

We’ve grown used to this, over the years.  We wear fleece-lined slippers, and layers of warm clothes. There are throws to snuggle into on the couch of an evening.  I have tea after dinner, reading or watching television.  The new high-efficiency oil furnace (no other choice except electricity, where we are) chugs away, doing its best.

All the heating to the bedroom floor is by convection, open grates in the floors and the wide staircase allowing heat to move upward.  Now we’re both home all day, the bedrooms are much warmer than when we were working, and had the thermostat turned down when we were out. We’re still adjusting to that, both of us liking cold bedrooms to sleep in.  I do wonder how the grandmother who slept in the attic survived, though – it’s just plain COLD up there – no heating at all, ice on the windows in the winter, damp in the spring and fall.  I suspect pneumonia carried her off.

We bought the house from a woman who had been born in it, about seventy-five years earlier.  She told us how the pipes use to freeze in the kitchen, unless the cupboard doors under the sink were left open in the winter. How the drains out to the dry well and the septic tank would freeze, too. The house wasn’t built with a bathroom; it came later.  I imagine going out to the privy on a cold winter’s night, or bathing in the kitchen in a tin tub.  We may only have the one bathroom, and when the winter wind is from the northwest prepare to shiver if you forget to turn the electric heater on – but luxury compared to that.

And that is what I am thinking about, this first windy, cold night of the fall.  What exactly do we need, and when does more become, in the words of a Monty Python skit, “bluddy luxury”? We could warm the house more – it would be simple:  turn the heat up, and turn more of the electric space heaters on. But not only would that cost us money, it would produce more greenhouse gases, more climate change, more pollution. Just because we can have something, should we? Doesn’t the attitude that says ‘sure, have more’ lead to obesity, metabolic disease, debt crises, foreclosures, addiction, and all the sins and symptoms of our material world?

Perhaps that’s an advantage of an old, cold, house.  It makes you think.

On Being a Tortoise

September 3, 2015

I have become somewhat sloppy in some of my practices of mindful living this past month. Somehow, I got out of my habit of shopping only twice a week, and have been running in to town to pick up a few items almost every day. (We live twelve miles outside of town, in a tiny village with no shop.) This needs to stop, not just because it’s wasteful of gas and time, but because it’s just not how I want to live my life.

I shopped Monday this week, but Tuesday and Wednesday, except for picking up fresh corn and tomatoes, I didn’t (and that doesn’t involve going in to town). Instead, I went walking, good two-hour hikes both mornings through woods and fields. Today I need to go into town again; but I have a plan. I’m going to put my bike on its carrier, park at the store I buy the most at, and then bike to the other places I need to go. I have both a basket and panniers for my bike, and the university town has both bike lanes and an extensive network of off-road multi-use trails, making it easy to get around.

To be fair to myself, I haven’t just been being lazy by not using them. I didn’t have the core strength to ride my bike with the added weight, especially the panniers, which I find also affect the balance of the bike. Following major abdominal surgery thirteen months ago, I was forbidden to do anything except walk or swim for six months, to allow complete healing. (And I can’t swim.) That took me to January, and the middle of the coldest winter on record for many years here. I kept active, but mostly inside, and mall walking, painting woodwork, and using the treadmill or exercise bike wasn’t enough to strengthen the core. (A lot of the regular abdominal exercises are also contraindicated after the type of surgery I had, so I couldn’t just do crunches, either.)

But then spring finally arrived, and I started walking seriously again, and biking, My balance was bad for a while.  I kept at it, and finally this last ten days I have been walking without my Nordic poles; first for half an hour, then for an hour, and for the last two days for two hours each day, on hiking trails with all their ruts, roots, and rocks.  I think I can safely say I don’t need the poles any more, at least on fairly level ground.  This means my core is stronger.  A small but significant victory.

So I’ll put the basket and panniers on my bike, and park in town at the grocery store, and after shopping there plan a circular route that will take me to the specialty poultry store, and the library, and back to the car.  I could walk it, and carry the chicken and the books, but biking works different muscles and I like to do both. If it goes well, then this will be how I run errands in town, at least until snow makes it too dangerous.

There have been times in this past year when I have felt like a tortoise:  slow, ungainly, and dependent on an external support system.  But ‘slow and steady’ did the trick.  I didn’t rush anything; I built on small gains in small increments. Sometimes I did push myself too hard, thinking I was ready for a distance or a difficulty of terrain I wasn’t, but I backed off immediately once I realized I’d misjudged.  I didn’t let either pride or the desire for a quick fix to result in injury, which in turn could have meant more surgery.  (That was quite the incentive to not overdo it, by the way.)

My healthier body means I will drive less, which benefits the environment as well as our gas budget.  I can do my share of the heavier chores, which BD’s bad back will definitely like!  I’m less likely to use (more) health-care resources, more likely to stay creative, happy, and useful in the community, and I’ll be living my life in a manner closer to my ideal.

*****

A later-in-the-day update….the plan worked.  I learned the following:  I have to make sure I have my balance completely right before I take a hand off the handlebars to signal a turn, or I wobble, especially after I had made my purchases and was carrying some weight.  I also learned that choosing to try this out on the hottest and most humid day of the entire summer wasn’t the best choice; normally I bike on rail trails and bike paths, and the additional heat radiating off the paved road surface was more than I had expected…and it was ten-thirty in the morning.  But I did it!