The Street - A Composite Sketch (26)

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 Twenty-sixth part of the anatomy of The Street.

The street seemed to boast an inordinate number of residents representing the officer class of the Canadian Armed Forces. There was, in fact, a handful of original house purchasers with the military, and one supposes that when their house changed hands the fact that the owners were military became known on their particular campus, and the new purchasers then became military officers. Which is precisely what occurred on this occasion, when the original buyers left. They had lived in the house for a decade, and neighbours had watched their two boys grow from awkward little boys to awkward big boys.

The husband and wife were a monumental size, both of them. She had flaming red hair, and was a large, well-proportioned woman with a wide stride. She was not only a military wife, she was employed, as a civilian, by the military. He was an officer, his size well suited to his wife's. He was about 6'-7" tall, and sturdily built. But as gentle a person as you might hope, which is often enough the case with large people. He was also gentlemanly, courteous and friendly. He was seen around the neighbourhood far more often than his wife. Which isn't entirely surprising, since she did double duty; mother-housewife, and fully employed.

Their sons made an odd pair. They not only did not resemble one another physically, but they quibbled constantly. One was, by the time the parents finally moved, the height of his father, red hair like his mother, but candle-thin. The boy was alert and well-spoken, happy to carry on conversations with any of the neighbours who stopped to talk with him. He was a credit to his parents. His brother, older than him by two years, was substantially shorter, and with a thick build, and a surly manner. It was rumoured that he hung about with skin-heads. When the two boys were alone, their arguments could get quite ugly.

And when the parents moved out to Western Canada, he to take command of a military command there, they decided to temporarily leave their sons in the care of a close friend, to live with the friend, and complete their education here. The tall, slender red-haired boy came back to the neighbourhood a few times to visit some of his friends who still lived on the street. His brother was never seen again, and it was whispered that he had become a fully-fledged racist, had left school and refused to communicate with his parents.

The new family that followed, in the house, was a little unusual. There was one adult, the father, and four children. Another military family; he was a civil engineer. Their mother, the father explained to anyone who was interested, lived on their other property, an old farmhouse in the Kingston area. She was an alcoholic, and they simply were unable to live together any longer. He had given up on her, her incessant promises, her ill health, her nastiness and her utter failure. He had assembled their children with no protest from her. The older boy ready to enter university, soon to be followed by his sister next in age to him.

The other, younger sister had been a ward of the Children's Aid Society, and had been living with foster parents. He wanted her back with him. She, more than her siblings, was retiring, extremely sensitive, had been vulnerable to their mother's drunken wrath and had suffered more than the others had. Her fragility was evident to those who spoke with her, and they came away admiring her dignity and her sweet demeanor. The youngest, a boy just into his teens, was another thing altogether. He revelled in presenting himself as a social deviant in the sense of rejecting normalcy.

He aspired to belong to a gang, and behaved like it. Oddly enough, he never defied his father outright. Instead, he behaved atrociously at school, enjoyed bullying other students, was known to behave poorly with teachers, and his father had often to speak to the school principal, promising to exert greater discipline with his wayward son. He said the boy was ultra-intelligent, and thus easily bored; it was needful to stimulate him cerebrally, to ensure he remained interested and well behaved. The father had his work cut out for him.

Neighbours, liking the father, admiring his determination in looking after his four children unassisted, hesitated to complain, but did approach him on occasion to point out how uncompromising his younger son was when he was reproached by neighbours asking him to refrain from behaving badly with their own children, and destructfully on their property. For a while the boy had pyromaniac tendencies, liked to light small fires, and watch, fascinated, as the fire assumed a life of its own, teasing the control of the boy.

Eventually, the oldest boy graduated from university, joined the military himself, and lived off base, with his mother. The second child was still at school, interested in social work; busy with her studies and seldom seen outside the house. The girl who had lived with a foster family asked her father's permission to return to the foster family, people who lived in a rural area, and her father found it difficult to let her go, but more difficult to refuse, and she left to resume living with them, quietly, away from the public eye, where they understood her needs and resumed nurturing her.

Finally the mother died, alone one day, in the farmhouse in Kingston, her health having completely collapsed. Neighbours knew that her health was becoming increasingly compromised, because they were kept up-to-date by the father. Who had integrated himself whole-heartedly in the community, and who had become a regular church-goer. Attending regular services, taking his recalcitrant younger son along. And he sang in his church's choir. And he also demonstrated, in his work around the house, that he was a consummate gardener, the envy of many of the women who tended their own gardens. He was a great one for giving knowledgeable gardening advice.

When his wife died he decided to retain the farmhouse, where his older son took up premanent residence, reporting to his military base from there, as his father had once done. With the proceeds of the life insurance on his wife, even while he mourned her miserable death, he hired contractors to build hardscape around his gardens, front and back, of ornamental brick and stone, along with a brickwork driveway, and that work took three men operating large vehicles to excavate as required, two months to complete.

Disappointingly, all that time and work and money resulted in nothing special. Neighbours who had undertaken similar work on their own, using their own sweat equity had designed and carefully completed far more attractive and equally extensive projects. But he was pleased with the results. And the fact was, all that activity, the work and the anticipation had taken his mind off other, unpleasant family matters. And that, in the end, was all that mattered.

c. 2009 Rita Rosenfeld