The Street - A Composite Sketch (2)

Not a very long street, just off a major arterial, it is shaped like a question mark. At the conclusion of the bulge it meanders into another street. One half of the street backs onto a heavily wooded ravine, a neighbourhood treasure, though few of the street's residents quite recognize its value, nor make use of its propinquity. It cleanses the air everyone breathes, it hosts birds and wildlife and presents a treasury of wildflowers throughout the seasons. At one time the street, part of a larger suburban community, shared a small-town address. It has long since been subsumed into the greater national capital of the country, through a wide-ranging amalgamation of communities and even farms. The street and the houses on it were built two and a half decades ago. The domiciles are comprised mostly of single-family, detached dwellings, with a handful of semis verging on the main thoroughfare. Many of the residents are the original home purchasers. They would comprise roughly 50% of the residents of the street. The semis appear to have changed hands far more often than the detached homes. And those homes that have been re-sold have often enjoyed a succession of owners. The original home owners who moved into their houses when their children were small have mostly bid farewell to now-grown children. The street represents an amalgam of family types, and there is a significant percentage at this time, of retired people, singly and in couples who, though their houses are meant for family occupation, still opt to remain in their too-large, but comfortable and familiar and valued homes. It is a very quiet street, with little traffic other than those who live there. The house fronts are diverse, and attractive. Most residents take care of their homes, seeing them as their primary investments. Furnaces have been replaced, and air conditioners, and also windows. Kitchens and bathrooms have been remodelled, and people have added decks and occasionally airy 'summer houses' to the backs of their homes. One-third of the homes boast swimming pools, in-ground and above-ground. Most people take pride in their properties, and feel they must achieve lawns that are weedless and smoothly green. Some painstakingly remove weeds by hand in the spring, others hire lawn-care companies to spread chemicals on their lawns. Invariably, the people who look after their own gardens and lawns have superior gardens and lawns. Each house has a large tree planted in front; maples, ash,crabapples, spruce or pine, fully mature. This is a community that is truly mixed, representing people from around the world, come to Canada as immigrants, settled and making the most of opportunities open to all its citizens in a free and open society noted for its pluralism and dedication to fair representation. There are the extroverts and the introverts, those who prefer not to mingle, others who do. They are herewith loosely sketched:

This is the second part of the anatomy of The Street.

They were approaching middle-age when they moved into their house, next to the hybrid Dutch-French couple. With them were two children who were in their teen years. This was a French-Canadian family. Comfortable in the area which boasted a 30% French-Canadian presence, unlike the west side of the city which was mostly Anglophone. French-Canadians tend to be most comfortable where they are not an absolute minority, and where they can anticipate that they will have service in their mother tongue.

It's an attitude typical of most French-Canadians. Not surprising since for most of their shared history with Anglophones they were meant to feel inferior as Francophones to the English-speaking majority. And they were traditionally discriminated against when it came to jobs. For one thing, if a Francophone was not perfectly bilingual opportunities would not come their way in the wider sphere of workplace opportunities, and that is hardly surprising.
There has always been an undercurrent of resentment between the two language-speakers.

This couple distinguished themselves immediately by commissioning an artist to produce a life-size representation of a bear, from a huge block of wood, a wonderful old pine trunk. Although the bear lacked an obvious pelt under which lay a thick cushion of fat due to the limitations of utilizing a straight pine trunk, regardless of its width, there was no mistaking the intent; more than notional, it was unmistakably an alert bear. And it stood in the centre of the lawn, close to the house, guarding the property and the inhabitants therein.

As the years went by, the once-fresh wood darkened and streaked and long cracks appeared. The bear began to look less menacing, less bear-like, more notional, but it remained what it was meant to be; a stylized bear, faithful to its purpose. The two young boys went through their French high school, and wandered on into university, eventually leaving home and their parents. They seldom returned to visit on the street, but in the summer months they spent time at the rustic family cabin close to the Gatineau Hills in Quebec.

There the entire family also converged at times in the winter where instead of fishing from a small motorized boat on the unproductive lake the cabin stood above, they drove snowmobiles. On one of those dark winter nights when the boys felt recklessly alive - despite parental admonitions for due caution - they disappeared forever into the depths of the lake, with the snowmobile. They were shooting across the lake as they often did. This time the ice was too thin, edging too near to winter's close.

The parents, never integrated into the community of the street, did not speak of their tragedy to any of their neighbours. Who seldom, in any event, ever saw them. These were people who would enter their garage through the house, get into their vehicles, back out and speed off to whatever destination. And on the return journey do the same, seldom appearing on the outside of their house, to greet or speak with neighbours. If and when they did, they were unfailingly polite, smiling, obviously sweet people.

It was an alert neighbour who discovered a small item in the newspaper and put the clues together. Word spread and some people took the initiative to ring the doorbell, to speak briefly with the grieving parents, to render their heartfelt but unconsoling regrets at their unspeakable loss. Others wrote little notes of sympathy, and left them in the mailbox beside the front door. The parents would never have recognized the names of any of their neighbours.

The house was put up for sale. Because the sale of any of the houses on the street was of immediate interest to many of the residents, some who took the trouble to look into the real estate listing ascertained the asking price and they were scandalized. More, far more than anyone else who sold on the street ever realized, and as word spread it was generally agreed that the house would never sell at that asking price. Nor did it. It was a very nice house, but nothing special on a street of very nice houses.

No upgrades had ever been done, aside from once, years earlier, the couple having hired a landscaping company to design a stone walkway at the front and an imaginative curved stone patio resembling a rush of water spiralling down the slanted lawn, beside the tired old bear. Hares from the adjacent ravine were often to be seen hopping about the side of the house, so the naturalist landscaping must have seemed compelling to them, at least.

Summer came and went, then autumn, and winter arrived. The house was empty, the couple having left for their usual months-long sojourn in Florida to avoid the rigours of another winter where they lived. And another summer, another autumn, yet another winter came and went, and with them a variety of real estate agents, all of them eager to sell the house, but even in a seller's market, which it was, no one was willing to pay the exorbitant price they wanted.

The house is still for sale. But the sign there now is that of a "Grapevine" realtor; themselves. They post 'open houses' hoping that if people are interested in living in that superior street in their very nice house, they will come and look and be so impressed they will make that offer. The woman once told a neighbour who was canvassing door-to-door for a charity that they were in no hurry, were prepared to wait until they got their price.

They're waiting still.