20 years

A brand new Schwartz farm in the early 90's

Brother/sister sleepover

When I was 7, I was taken kicking and screaming from my home in Sandy Hill, Ottawa to my new home, in Blakeney, Middle of Nowhere. I actually am not even sure what you could put beside Blakeney-comma except Ontario. And it is certainly a blip on Ontario’s radar. So it was a change that any 7 year old may struggle with, but me especially because I’m stubborn and become stuck in my ways, even at 7. I was only three years away from being able to walk across the street to Mr. Karim’s corner store by myself, like my 11 year old sister could! Would I now NEVER get to experience this??? What about how Bryant and I switched rooms all the time, or sometimes met in the middle to sleep in the hallway in a mountain of blankets? Now we didn’t even have our own rooms! And the hallway didn’t meet in the middle at my parents room anymore, where we felt safest sleeping in the hallway! What about how I would watch the  car lights at night move across the ceiling to fall asleep? Was I supposed to ACTUALLY count sheep now? Or maybe goats as it turned out...

B and I checking out how the country is different than the city

No matter how I looked at it, it just wasn’t fair. Especially how we left in June, and I had to start in a new grade 1 class in JUNE! I mean how cruel can your parents be! My main  bad memory surrounding the move was being in the parking lot of Pakenham Public School and literally holding on to the door frame of my Mom’s maroon and faux-wood paneled van and crying and screaming and refusing to go in. I think that memory is what leads me to believe i just hated everything about moving. I also remember being sad at recess and wanting to find my sister, but she was busy being a super cool grade 5 student. 

Me and "Lucky" (and Bryant...)

But actually, other than those school memories, I only have fond memories once I actually arrived in my new home out in the country. Moving there for the summer was the best - so much better than the city (Wait, did my parents actually know best, and not want to torture us after all?). We bought chickens and ducks, starting me on a lifelong obsession with feathered friends. All of my stories, research projects, and art work centered around birds after that, mostly chickens, mostly ones with names like “Cinnamon” and “Helicopter” and my very most special chicken “Lucky”. I loved finding all the fresh eggs in the nest boxes (until I turned 13...I guess that is when foraging for bird embryos in dirty poopy hay boxes becomes less cool?). We also bought peacocks, goats, our dog Tess who lived with us on the farm for 14 years, and a cat or two, who eventually were evicted by my father.

Sam and B with baby goats

Our house was a bungalow, no more stairs for Bryant and I to run up and down on, with the corner at the top where we’d trip. Now we had a long hallway with a door in the middle we could slam into each other at the last minute. Or we could close all the bedroom doors and the hallway door, and we had a full pitch black hallway, pretty cool for flashlight games, lightbright and general spooky fort making. Sam and Bryant had one bunk bed in their room, and Nat and I had another in our room...lots of things to climb and throw things at people from above. None of the rooms locked though, which sure did lead to some frustration and pleading with mom and dad “ Moooooooooooom Bryant won’t stop flinging my door open and throwing Sam’s underwear in here!!!”  The whole house was carpeted, some of it very ugly. Within a few years, and over the course of a few months, dad and the boys redid every bedroom, hallway, main rooms and kitchen in hardwood. There were piles of wood everywhere, saws and ear protectors lying around every corner. Every piece was measured and fit into the puzzle that was the blueprint of our home. They ran out of wood so the bedroom closets are only half done to this day. 

Sam taking a break from hardwood flooring with an Archie

Outside was a whole other world. When my dad would cut the grass in the summer, Bryant and I would make crazy racetracks with the grass piles, forming them into paths all over the giant yard and playing tag in it. We would do the same with snow in the winter, and leaves in the fall. In the fall and winter we would take all of the lawn chairs that stayed on the porch year round for some reason, and use them to make crazy snow and leaf tunnels by covering them all around and being able to crawl through them. Sam would usually end up popping his head through one, leading Bryant and I to great frustration after all of our hard work!!!

90's coats

We would go on “gulley” walks as a pack of 6, my parents taking us on a tour of the entire property, which went on for acres and acres. We always had to walk over lots of creaks and up lots of hills and dad would go first and make bridges over water that couldn’t be crossed so easily. The way back was always hardest. 

The River

We dubbed the farm “sweet-tree farm” not long after moving in, to go with our big dreams of maple syrup making. Man, that one year of maple syrup was great...for whatever reason it didn’t last...maybe my dad burnt an entire batch in the hollowed out fridge he used to cook it up in. From my child’s memory, it is hard to piece together that whole maple-syrup season...I remember the buckets on the trees, and checking them, but then  I also remember this giant refrigerator vat my dad cooked it in. How that all worked I have no idea...but it sure was yummy! Maybe he was cooking up crack for all I know? We also went through a season of apple picking, where I remember using the big apple crusher to make cider outside. 

Mom teaching Austin to ride his bike, in the same place his Aunt and Uncles learned

At some point our road became named Mountain View Road and we got a blue number, 349. I don’t actually remember how in the world someone would find us before that. We honestly didn't have an address before that if I remember correctly. We were just Schwartz/Atkinson, in the RR#4 of Pakenham. I guess you just needed to read our banged up metal mailbox to find us. You couldn’t even see us, a kilometer away from the “main” (ha!) road. That lane way was both a friend and a foe to us. It forced me to finally learn to ride a bike, so I didn’t have to walk up the lane way each morning to the bus while my siblings (ahem, YOUNGER sibling) biked up. Yes, Bryant learned before me. I admitted I was stubborn. We had a little bike parking “cove” at the top. In the winter dad would get out the tractor and blow the lane way out before school, so sometimes we would all get on the hood of the tractor in our snowsuits with our backpacks and freeze our butts off for the free ride, just so we didn’t have to walk in the snow. It look about 4 times as long on the tractor as walking would have, and our butts would be frozen solid by the time we got to the bus stop. I learned to drive a dirt bike coming up and down the lane way. I tried to practice my sweet snowboarding moves ( read: stand up) on the hill at the end without much success . I attempted to skate up that lane way during the ice storm of ’98 (without much luck). I learned to drive by going up and down it, and further perfected my ability to start on a hill in a standard. As I got older it was just annoying...forced me to be snowed in on the weekend and cancel plans sometimes, get my car stuck, be late for school. And then I got older again and enjoyed it once more, as an adult, appreciating the privacy it gave me when jogging.

Our ride to the bus stop

The Schwartz kitchen of yesteryear

Somewhere along the line, 349 Mountain View become home...”the farm.” In the process of becoming home, the cupboards in the kitchen wore down behind the handles. The wallpaper began peeling in rooms we didn’t use much, so it was never fixed. The dryer broke and was never replaced. The chicken coop became home to the lawnmower, and the barn home to his and her motorcycles. Bedrooms became offices. 6 chairs were no longer needed around the kitchen table. Finally, it was just a big house, with two parents in it. It was still “home” during holidays, but after the tragic loss of my baby brother Sam, on the very property that already had so many memories, the memories became too strong to be our “home” base anymore. Tragedy does not erase the amazing 20 years that have passed since we moved in there, but 3 years ago it became harder to create new memories amongst the bad ones. I am 27 years old and I can still step out of my car in the driveway and see that house as I saw it when I was 7...but I can’t look at the guest room without knowing it was emptied of his things by someone other than him. I can’t walk beside the hedge without knowing that was where he took his last breath. I can’t look at his writing etched into the cement of my dad’s barn without imagining a curly haired little boy with a stick doing it. I can’t look at all of the “parts” cars in the gully, without seeing his red Audi still sitting at the top, under a tarp, because no one knows what to do with it. No one can ignore those things, because Sam is a memory that is everywhere, and even without 349 Mountain View, will be with us always.

The kitchen in April 2010, celebrating Sam's departure to Australia

Sam's Australia cake (+Grandma's bday)

The lane way transformed into a km long parking lot during Sam's "celebration of life" 6 days after his death,
July 2010

An empty Schwartz Farm, May 2013

My parents built a new house, resembling in no way our old home, and can now fill it with new memories of grandchildren. The farm will be sold some day soon, once someone gets the mental energy to prepare it for sale. Those half hardwooded closets will need to be finished or at least carpeted. Those kitchen cupboards could use an upgrade and the stove and dryer are from the 80s. No one wants wallpaper anymore. The bathrooms used to be colour coded by the hideous colours they were decorated in...the blue bathroom, the green bathroom and the white bathroom. They have all been upgraded now thankfully,  but have no such helpful codes to explain which bathroom you will use. We never really needed window coverings, but perhaps to sell it, proper blinds will need to be installed. And of course, someone will eventually need to decide where Sam’s Audi will finally Rest in Peace. 

June 1993-June 2013...it’s really been 20 years.