Living in the city now HEATHER DAVIS
A neighbourhood can make or break you. It defines you and how you see the world. Depending on your neighbourhood, the world is either a great place or it's going to hell.
After living in the country, in L'Avenir, I thought that Montreal would offer excitement, opportunities, and noise, noise, and more noise.
Surprise. It's actually quite tranquil in our neighbourhood.
In the country, there was always somebody making a huge amount of noise with a snow blower, a snowmobile, a four-wheeler, a rifle, some electric tools, a motorcycle, cranked music, a wild party, an unsuccessful car repair attempt, or some crabby cows.
Here, I am amazed at the number of people living in such close proximity and – generally -- not getting on each other's nerves.
People seem to walk pretty quietly, talk pretty quietly, and entertain pretty quietly. The noises that float in the windows with the breeze are not grating: a child practising the violin, youngsters playing in the lane, neighbours chatting over back fences… Of course, just as I write this, I hear a big, old motorcycle hog in the back lane.
Well, anyway, life is pretty good here.
We had a bit of a scare regarding the friendliness of our neighbours after we were verbally accosted when our dog, Woo, lifted his leg on one of our neighbour's hedges. Ghis apologized on Woo's behalf for the unauthorized watering (I don't think Woo was really sorry), but the man ranted on about the twelve years he had spent constantly caring for his hedge.
We noticed later that he is the proud owner of a rather large Rottweiler himself. But to patch things up, Ghis has been visiting in a neighbourly fashion with the watering can and irrigating the wound (urination-inundation site).
Our apartment comes complete with one of the city's teeny tiny balconies. The dogs love to laze out there in the sun and that's about all the room there is. To the right of our balcony, our neighbour has her balcony and several times we tried a friendly "hello."
No response. She didn't even turn her head.
Well, we thought, at least our landlord is friendly. Whenever we begin chatting with him (jazz fan, French literature Prof, staunch separatist), our conversations go on and on and on.
The other day he had an especially good story for us. I guess I had neglected to move our white Golf to the other side of the street at street cleaning time. Unbeknownst to me it was the only vehicle left on the street.
Well, our balcony neighbour saw the ticket giver-outer and she came down and knocked on our landlord's door. She told him that our car was in danger of getting a ticket. This wasn't easy for her to say. Turns out she is completely deaf and cannot really speak very much either.
Out on the street an older man (who lives on the corner and wears very fine hats), whom we had never met, was telling the ticket giver-outer not to give us a ticket because we had just moved in and came from Vancouver and just didn't know the rules yet. As luck and good neighbours would have it, we didn't get a ticket, just this story later that evening.
Today when I took Woo down to the front lawn for a sprinkle-tinkle, she leaned over her balcony and made gestures towards me. I understood what she was saying. "What a beautiful day. You have beautiful dogs. Aren't we lucky to be alive?"
I smiled and gestured back. "Yes it is. Thank you. Yes, we are." Then she blew me a kiss
Copyright © 2001 Heather Davis/Log Cabin Chronicles/05.01 |
