When I was a kid my parents often took me and my sisters over to Shotover Hill on weekend mornings, not far from where we lived in Oxfordshire. It’s an ancient forest and hill, with a decent view of the shire. A Royal Forest too, whatever that is, until the 17th Century. And when they were in season, we’d pick blackberries up there.

The Everly is Kingston’s newest downtown restaurant. And one of its best. A midcentury theme and an impressive menu has transformed an old bank building, softening the space into something resembling the room you’d eat in every day in if you could.

The snow is throwing itself around outside the office window. And while we should be filing paperwork and proofing copy, instead we’ve been playing each other songs and videos from our youth.

I got another “Property Evaluation Certificate” in the mail today. You know the ones, probably, with the faux gold seal, and the ornate border like that on a bank note, and the suggestion that you “keep this valuable certificate with your important documents … if for some reason you do not wish a property evaluation at this time.” I’m not happy about it.

I never expected, at any moment in my first sixteen years, to fly into Mississauga one wet night in 1980, and have to find somewhere to live. Or to end up decades later a realtor at the other end of Lake Ontario. But shit happens and this is my best reading of how.

Here’s how I feel about the real estate business and the neighbourhood as we push away from 2020’s dark starting line. There are forecasts and updates, hope and despair. It’s got it all, this one.

See, to my mind, the above isn’t a vacant one-bedroom apartment at all, whatever the listing says, even if that copy does caution that “improvements” might be needed. That, my friend, is just a really wet cinder block basement with some pretty ominous dangling electrical. The sort of room Keanu Reeves fights his way out of during a career slump. 

There are burn marks about head-height on the inside of the grey shower curtain of this shabby Toronto hotel. Someone smoked in here is my guess, and the water pressure is low - more a damp, warm drizzle than the righteous downpour I was looking for after my late night and early morning.

The fierce wind this week in Kingston brought down far more fences than it did trees. I sleep high in the house, right under the rafters, and was intermittently alarmed. While I sought more sleep, huddled under cold sheets, the force of that wind arrived in my mind’s eye as a series of pale grey shadows crowding me into a corner of the bed. It was a jostling rather than a face.

I was in New York City recently. Cheri was minding the shop. I feel guilty leaving work behind (stupid of me, I know), but Cheri had her own excursion south a few weeks further back, and even completed a deal from the Grand Canyon, her phone held high in the air like some lighter at a rock concert. It was my turn, I told myself. A chance to actually talk to the kids, to notice all the ways in which they’ve grown.

The spring is usually our busiest season, but not this year. Things started more slowly than normal and I wondered if we’d ever recover to our normal level. I fretted, in fact. And paced. But the last six weeks have been the busiest of our year, and there is no sign of things slowing down. We have three new listings coming this week.

There will come a day when I don’t make the walk up to the Sunday Market at the Memorial Centre. It’s inevitable. The knees will give out, or the mind. Conceivably we move into another neighbourhood (once the kids have left home), or out beside a quietly muscular river north of the city. All good things come to an end, you realise.

There is no website for Wok-In, a tiny Asian restaurant on the west side of Montreal St, between Princess and Queen, and I’m okay with that. Because if you set up some snazzy one-pager on Squarespace, load the bottom with honest reviews, I’d likely never get in there again. The line-ups would begin at dawn.

A couple of months back, a $500,000 Kingston house sold for more than $175,000 over the asking price. So I think it’s fair to say that it’s a bit mad out there. I don’t know what to make of sales like that. It’s become really hard, damn near impossible, to predict the sale price of houses once there are competing offers registered. I mean, how do you put a dollar figure on desperation?

As far as I can figure it, Lem pulled off Sunbury Rd sometime in the spring of 1980. He was built differently then, an inch and a half taller for starters, and his thick white shirt had the sleeves rolled up past the elbows. A pair of worn olive suspenders. Arms you’d be proud of.

I’ve been listening a lot this week to the debut album by London band black midi. Schlagenheimis the title. It’s a compelling, brilliant, but often unpleasant sort of listen. That four people found each other at school and decided it would be a blast to make this sort of noise together is in itself rather remarkable.

I’m speechless, more or less. And I don’t really want to add many of my own words. It’s enough to say that when Cheri and I pulled open the envelope left in our office mailbox and found the above drawing inside, it made everything that went before it last week, both good and bad, just sort of fade away, like a fog burning off a brilliant blue sea…

I was asked tonight what rodent I thought might be eating the front corner of the garage at a property I have listed for sale. I am sitting in the garden, minding my own business and ignoring that bit of work. With headphones. My son in the kitchen behind me with his math tutor. My daughter at the lake for a play rehearsal. The poppies bobbing out front.

At first the house was empty without him and then, when I learned to accept the quiet spaces and even to revel in them, it was just expensive. He moved into an apartment close to the university campus, a two-bedroom garret at the top of a limestone rowhouse down by City Park, with cracked plaster walls and floors that dove sharply down into the corners.