My life has been pretty dull where moving is concerned. I never got kicked out of the house for anything, I took the bus to my college classes every day, and lived at home until I was 25, except for that brief stint when I was 18, moving out for the first time under my own steam – well, sort of.
My friend had actually talked me into it, since his parents had just built a large house on the shores of Lake Dalrymple in Sebright, Ontario, which was a one-and-a-half-flea-speck town 20 minutes outside of Orillia. (The real flea speck in that region, whose name I can’t remember, was about 20 minutes further outside Sebright, which had its town limit signs for either direction within 100 feet of each other.) He decided it was high time I moved out on my own – and in with him and his parents. “Well,” I thought, “Why not?” I had no job and no money, but he convinced me with some (ultimately ill-fated) Government-sponsored program called “Futures,” which was a job search program that paid you a pittance ($500/mo) while they taught you interview skills, a few basic job skills, and gave you job leads. (In reality it was like Kindergarten for the adult job market, which is to say there was more play time than education.)
Moving was pretty simple. Packed up everything, loaded it all into his dad’s car, and off we went on the 90 minute trip. I recall that Howard Jones’ Everlasting Love was playing on the radio, largely because at the time it was his new single and it was the first time I heard it, so it spurred me to buy the cassette.
Moving in was similarly easy. I got my own room which was small and scarcely had enough space to put my stuff – which was in stark contrast to the rest of the house, which had massive living areas and an enormous kitchen, so I’ve no idea why the bedrooms were so damn small. That’s just the way they had it built. It was difficult getting to sleep the first night there though. It got dark up there, with no streetlights for miles around, and without the constant low-level white noise of the big city that I’d been used to living in all my life, it was also too damn quiet. More than anything, this drove home the separation between me and my old life.
Petty dull, all things considered. Apropos of nothing, I only stayed there about 3 months before moving back, but I brought two significant things back with me when I moved back home: 1) A rediscovery of the joy of reading (because there’s bugger all else to do there) via Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels when my friend lent me one and I subsequently bought the rest of the entire set as was available at the time; and 2) Chicken pox.
Perhaps amusingly (though it wasn’t to me at the time), the fever dream I had while enduring the worst of the pox was one that I kept continuing from where I left off after I was awoken by the itching begging for another application of calamine lotion. I was in part of a Xanth novel – I can’t recall which one, but it involved a magic carpet and a jumping spider. (Crewel Lye, I think it was.)
</end dull moving tale>
Back in a bit with my Labour Day Out, with lots of pretty pictures.
It’s gonna be lonely around here.
