I spent most of my young life hopping from apartment to apartment, and at least three rental houses, some being quite nice and in convenient neighborhoods to where my parents worked and I went to school. We never lived in badly run rental properties but I know those who did, and I felt sorry for the fact that when it rained outside, a few minutes later in was also raining inside. But for us Currie home was where we hung our respective hats, ate dinner, watched Hockey Night in Canada, and communed with those residents who also liked to watch and debate hockey heritage, and play Bridge or Euchre, my parents favorite indoor pastimes. When we lived up on Bracebridge's Alice Street, in the former Weber apartments, in the late 1960's up to the autumn of 1974, it was the neatest reality of living, that almost all of the residents were comfortable enough with each other, to leave their doors open late into the night. It meant that there was regular apartment hopping and it was a little like a commune at times, and it did make us a lot more friends, I believe, that if we had kept doors shut as a rule of residency.
I am particularly keen about housing, and my relationship to home and property for what may seem a selfish and even strange reason. I can't write a sentence today, if I am unsettled or otherwise uninspired by the setting. There was a time of course, when I was writing weekly for several local publications, including the Bracebridge Herald-Gazette, The Muskoka Advance, and the Muskoka Sun, of which I was an editor, when I had no choice but to write any where at any time day or night. I had to over-ride my need for sources of inspiration with the reality I needed a pay cheque. If I couldn't write then I wasn't go to be able to eat, and yes, drink a wee bit. So I made do with the digs I was living in at the time, some slightly more inspirational than others, even as far as the view from my work place. The McGibbon House in Bracebridge, formerly a home and medical office of Dr. Peter McGibbon, was a wonderful exception. It was a truly haunted estate that afforded me a panoramic view down onto Manitoba Street's Memorial Park. I wrote fifty percent of my weekly editorial copy from that charming early 1900's house, and even had enough time to author two small books with co-authors, and photographer Tim DuVurnet, and Suzanne's mother Harriet Stripp. It was a generously endowed house with a lot of ghostly activity that was always welcome and never fear-inspiring. It was too enchanted to be anything but enthralling, and often times the intrusions happened unexpectedly at the time I was working away at my clanking old Underwood manual. I didn't care about the suddenness of the intrusions, which happened mostly in the attic area of the three story building, or on the back staircase and its eerie low light and creaking, narrow character all the way to the basement. It was a writer's paradise.
I've lived in several houses after this, with our young family, one on Bracebridge's lower section of Ontario Street, and another on Golden Beach Road where we could see the sparkling waters of Lake Muskoka. Both houses were seriously haunted, and the spirited hangers-on were not afraid of announcing themselves, by various disturbing interventions, such that what could have been a fruitful relationship for the writer in residence, was mired in between being inspirational and antagonistic. As if most of the time, the resident specters preferred us gone from the properties. While we didn't move from these places because of ghostly encounters, I really did have to live in a residence that challenged me in a more positive way. I often faced having to compose twenty to thirty editorial pieces a week, and I really needed to feel good about the process, as my boss needed to fill all the white space in between the ads of his highly successful Muskoka Sun. He didn't want to hear from me that I couldn't find my mojo that week, or that I wasn't feeling in the mood to do my job. It's hard to explain what inspirations I required to write such volume, other than to suggest it wasn't enough in these houses to keep me prosperously employed in the print industry. I had to move. It was that simple and Suzanne understood this, as we began looking around for a new place to lodge our young family.
We have lived at Birch Hollow, in Gravenhurst, since the autumn of 1989, and there was only one six month stretch when I truly felt my writing career had enjoyed its last click and tack on the typewriter. It wasn't that the house stopped being of inspiration, but rather it came at a time when I had changed employers and found myself exhausted by demands. Working from home, in that first year of residency, I had to get up at three in the morning to type up the news stories I had been researching in the days leading up to press deadline. I often had to attend a local council meeting that might have ended at ten o'clock, and then after a few hours of shut-eye, rise to the task of turning rough, hard to read notes into publishable copy before nine a.m. which was my deadline on a Tuesday morning. After having a serious difference of opinion with the publisher, I quit the job and sat out the next six months, concentrating instead on getting our Bracebridge Antique shop turning a profit. As I've mentioned previously, one profession has always backed the other as an alternative, when for whatever reason, the going got bogged down and I needed a change of pace. For many years our business, Birch Hollow Antiques and Birch Hollow Writing Services operated out of the houses we were living in at the time, and it has only been in the past ten years that the enterprises have been separated; I write at Birch Hollow, the residence, and we work at Birch Hollow the antique shop in the former Muskoka Theatre building on Muskoka Road, opposite the Gravenhurst Opera House.
Writing here in this most engaging sanctuary of home, at what we with affection know as Birch Hollow, built on a knob of land overlooking the wetland across the lane, we call the "Bog," it seems almost impossible to think of an occasion when I wouldn't be able to sit down wherever, in our haunting clutter of antiques and art, with a glorious view from here, and not be excited about the proposal of writing something or other for some purpose, or just for recreation. I've been a journeyman writer since I was twenty years of age, and seeing as I'm not approaching my sixty-sixth, still engaged in this partnership of house and creative enterprise, it is a most pleasing and profitable relationship in a most modest and frill-free accommodation; that has long protected and generated warm feelings for all of us Currie inmates, and those we have lodged, including oh so many stray pets over the decades needing a good home.
We have received countless solicitations recently asking us to sell Birch Hollow, even in as-is condition, because the present market is apparently super-charged with cash buyers. Although we haven't had any of these real estate folks knock on our front door, to make an in-person appeal, for us to list our property, we have had a stream of gawkers and we assume house hunters, buyers and sundry other tourists, judging our neighborhood on gad-abouts, making us feel rather uncomfortable when sitting on our verandah enjoying the view from here. How much does one ask for a slice of paradise anyway? We don't have lakefront and we thankfully don't pay lakeshore tax rates. We haven't made improvements in our house beyond paint, wall paper and some interior doors, and our landscaping was done by enthusiastic home gardeners with plants and lilacs brought from our former family cottage in Windermere. Why then do we look like a piece of barbecue steak to these obviously hungry real estate voyeurs? I suppose it looks better from the outside, with a rustic Muskoka curb-appeal. We don't have a lot of physical attributes to pump up the asking price, and I don't suspect any of these house hunters and real estate agents on the prowl give a hoot about resident ghosts who dwell here, or think of them as significant enhancements or, in real estate terms, chattels.
As the valuation of our house seems to increase each month in this crazy carnival of real estate buying, Suzanne and I simply can't get excited about the possibility of being cash rich for the first time in our lives. This is where our family has spent most time and invested most emotion through some very good yet trying times in the chronicle of getting older. Some of our dear house guests of the past, two well known historians in particular, have since passed on, and yet we feel as if they never really left us. And if it is indeed the case, that even my Mother and Father, kept it urns in our family room, feel in the contemporary sense, the spiritual comfort of indirect home ownership, gosh, we simply couldn't leave them behind. Some can for cash, likely because they don't believe in ghosts, or that they can fill the void in a house without taking up a lot of day to day living space. But it doesn't mean they're not there, and have attachments to the place that has just been put up for sale to the highest bidder.
I couldn't really explain to a real estate speculator who important it is for a fellow like me, to have such an enchanted place like Birch Hollow, to facilitate my interest in writing daily. You sort of have to live the life of a writer to know just how important it is, to be inspired by the place, the space and the view that prevails in the portal of an office that cultivates creativity. I can't write in a place that doesn't generate the kind of special interest that this particular haunted abode provides in vast supply. If you have ever set down to write something, a letter or letter to the editor of the local press, and stared blankly at a computer screen or white paper in the typewriter carriage, and could not type out one complete word for a seeming eternity, then you might then appreciate how important it is to a career writer, to work in an environment that is fertile to creative enterprise, whether that be the handiwork of resident spirits, and the kind of good old stuff that fuels my passions, or just the soothing confidence of being embraced by sanctuary; encouraged by nothing in particular, but calmed by the generality and normalcy of a simple family home that has been a faithful companion for long and long. It is those soft illuminations through the windows late at night, when the weary traveller arrives home again, that softens the hard and jagged edges of yet another challenging, stressful day in these contemporary times.
Suzanne and I do not wish to sell off our home here at Birch Hollow. It will be joyfully passed down in our family, where we hope it will survive as an inspirational place in which to dwell, for many decades yet to come. Home is for more than hanging a hat and casual residence. I have known many comforting homes in the past, whether a simply appointed third floor apartment, or the back rooms of a former doctors home, where I lodged warmly and comfortably for several years as a recently graduated student of history. I could write there as well, and heartily so, benefitting from the sense of a still occupied home, that carried its history subtly yet poignantly, especially in the final few minutes before I'd sail off to sleep, sensing that there was an unreserved peacefulness of past lives and passions still guarding the old place; and it gave me a feeling of security that also is difficult to explain to those who buy and sell homes with regularity, who never really have more than a place to hang their hats, before the next for sale sign is hammered into the ground.
It doesn't matter where you live. It doesn't matter that it is a place where respite and restoration is generously offered, and that has nothing whatsoever to do with resident luxuries. Is it a "home," in the spirit of sanctuary. It is sanctuary that we need most, and that has been most dearly appreciated during the pandemic lockdown that has kept so many of us housebound.
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