Toronto, April 6, 2025
Packing up
Last week Cynnie and I packed up our beloved house by the sea. We’ve sold it. It was time to leave.
For almost thirty years we’ve spent every summer in this house. We’ve had rich and happy times there. Family and friends constantly came and went. We filled the place with old furniture, bric-a-brac, books, pictures. We had dinner parties where wine was drunk and everyone laughed. We walked on the beach. We worked in the garden, and the garden was beautiful.
Leaving is heart-rending. Packing up was gut-wrenching. Followers of this Newsletter will know that I have strong feelings about home and moving—see Endgame #81 (“A cab at the door”) and #87 (“Going home”). As I left the house in Port Medway for the last time, I turned back, and looked at it, stopped for a moment, said goodbye, and wept.
There were many reasons to go. Cynnie and I debated them endlessly. We love it here, we told each other. Port Medway is a big part of our lives. We adore the house and the friends we have made in Nova Scotia. Maybe one day we’ll sell it, but not now. Maybe we’ll sell in two years, or three, or never.
But encroaching old age put its thumb on the scale. The right decision became clear. The reasons for leaving came to outweigh the reasons for staying.
There were many reasons for leaving. Looking after an old house in the country, particularly from afar, takes fortitude. Medical care in rural Canada is sketchy. In the country you are car dependent and, as vision occludes and reflexes weaken, travel becomes dicey. Amenities, from grocery stores to movie theatres, are scarce and scattered. Increasingly there is extreme weather.
Why now? There was the growing knowledge that, one day, anyway, we will have to sell and go. The kids and grandkids, with their demanding lives elsewhere, don’t want the place. Inevitably, one spouse will predecease the other. For the survivor, old and frail, to sell and pack up alone, would be awful.
And so we pack up together. There’s no room for sentimentality. Everything must go. Some things can be sent to our place in Toronto, but there’s not much room there. Local friends and neighbours take some stuff because they want it, or maybe as a favour—a sofa, chairs, desk, toaster oven, pictures, knick knacks, a vintage Raleigh bicycle, a particularly good corkscrew. We sell a few things to an antique dealer.
That left the books. I never counted the books in Nova Scotia, but there must have been well over a thousand. They were of all kinds—novels, biographies, history, travel, books from my childhood. I read all of them over the years. For decades I took them with me wherever I went. They told the story of my life. Now, perhaps, they were more of a liability than an asset.
I kept just a few of the books and took them to Toronto: books that were gifts, written, or inscribed, by friends: Biggles Sweeps the Desert by Captain W.E. Johns—a childhood favourite: a 35¢ paperback biography of Winston Churchill, bought with my own money when I was a kid: Ernest Shackleton’s 1909 two-volume The Heart of the Antarctic, found many years ago in a second hand book shop in London’s Charing Cross Road.
The local library said it would be happy to take my books. I told myself it would be liberating to be rid of them, to be free from the burden of dragging them around.
But it was not liberating. I was full of sorrow to see them go.
*****
Some reader comments on Newsletter #99 (“A visit to Highgate Cemetery”)
Howard Norman writes from Vermont: “In 2007, with the help of a translator named Michiko Zento, I visited 46 burial shrines of Japanese writers. Ginko trees, cuckoos, astonishing flower arrangements--- Basho's was perhaps my favorite, the Akutagawa Ryonosuke's (He wrote the story "Rashomon") had a certain likeness to Jim Morrison's in Paris; for the 35 year old suicide, there were vials of veronal, graffiti, all sorts of art work, and a life-size sculpted portrait made of cardboard and elegantly painted, under an umbrella.”
And from Randy Hahn: “Endgame #99 prompted me to recall my own stroll through Highgate cemetery many years ago. As you may or may not have noticed Karl Marx is buried across from the philosopher Herbert Spencer whose views were pretty much completely opposite of Marx’s. As many have pointed out the locale can be described as ‘Marx and Spencer.’”
A note to readers
This is the one hundredth edition of The Endgame. Newsletter #1 was published on December 5, 2022. It was not very good, and (along with some others) has been left out of the collection of Newsletters, skilfully edited and arranged thematically by Gabrielle Domingues, that will be available in June. More about this book, All Remaining Passengers, later.
I'm sorry our time didn't overlap more! You were winding down here as we were getting started. I know the community is so much better for your having been here! <3
My wife and I have experienced the same sense of loss a few times in our lives together. There is something sad about ending significant chapters of our lives. May this next chapter of yours be filled with of surprises as you tread new paths.