We’ve just returned from ten days in Tuscany, where the sun is honey-glazed and the grapes are warm and silver-leafed olive trees grow in golden groves; the land of fior di latte gelato and pizza Margherita, chirping crickets and clusters of cypresses and the best damned Chianti I’ve ever tasted.

I tried to write while I was there, in the hammock, glass of wine in hand, overlooking the Tuscan hills to Florence down below. I truly did. But the sun was so warm and the hammock so somnolent that, well, I just couldn’t bring myself to write about somewhere else when I was in a little slice of paradise. Can you blame me, really?

I’m back in London now. It’s grey and chilly and I’ve just dropped mom off at the airport and I’m feeling all the feelings that come with dropping loved ones off at the airport without knowing when you might see them next. I’ve got my wooly socks on and a steaming cup of Rooibos tea by my side and it seems like now is as good a time as any to catch up on the series that I started far too long ago. So, without further ado, the Nelson years.

Lower Bonnington Road, Nelson, British Columbia
Summer 2001
Soundtrack: David Gray – Please Forgive Me

I felt as if I’d touched down somewhere over the rainbow, in a magical land of munchkins, that permanently smelled of citrus-pine weed and patchouli incense; where hippies mingled with intellectuals, artists, snowboarding enthusiasts, back-to-the-landers, expats, outdoor adventurers, people who didn’t fit in where they used to be, some living off the grid, many weary of the system, most flying their freak flags high and proud, in this small town nestled in the mountains of British Columbia. A bubble. The kind of place where people talk about energy a lot.

Nelson was good to us from the start, like a sweet old grand-ma having you over for tea, offering you the best biscuits in her cupboard. The energy I talked about earlier meant that there were no chance encounters, that everything led to something amazing*, and we discovered just how serendipitous things could be within a day of crossing the orange bridge that led into town.

We hadn’t been in Nelson for more than 24 hours when we decided to check the community board in the local co-op for places to rent. Within minutes of our arrival, and completely out of the blue, an ex-Deadhead from Colorado asked us if we were looking for a place to stay. Her name was Laurie and she needed farm hands to help with the five acres of land that she and her husband had recently purchased on the outskirts of town. That very night, we visited her organic farm, shared a bong hit and badaboom, badabing… rent sorted.

We lived all summer without electricity or running water in the rustic pioneer cabin that sat on the corner of her land. There was an outhouse up the hill, a cooler for a fridge and a camping stove for cooking. We fixed up the cabin, built greenhouses and a chicken coop, planted peas and potatoes, picked pears and plums and cherries and walnuts, canned tomatoes, froze raspberries and pressed apples for juice. Our days were spent with our hands in the earth, nights reading by candlelight. And afternoons, you could usually find us at our secret aqua-green swim hole ten minutes down the road.

I sometimes babysat the neighbour’s son for pocket-money. The father was an artist who was supposed to be making art while I babysat but he usually tinkered in his basement, moving junk from one side of the room to the other. He called this “cleaning the basement”. His wife wasn’t impressed.

At the weekends, I spent most of my pocket-money at my favourite coffee shop: Oso Negro. Oso Negro was the town hub, with the best organic espresso on Earth (I still believe this to be true); a place that displayed a sign that read: “We want this to be a comfortable space for everyone: customers, passersby, co-workers and neighbours. Blocking the stairs and sidewalk, smoking pot, drumming, playing loud music, letting dogs run loose and littering infringe on people’s space. Please help us maintain a friendly, cooperative environment for people of all ages and walks of life.” This, in my opinion, pretty much epitomises the essence of Nelson.

Laurie had two dogs, Melvin and Harpo. K and I had wanted a dog for years but we were never in the right place, and it was never the right time. It usually isn’t when it comes to pets and babies. “We’ve wanted a dog for years,” we said to Laurie one day, probably while passing a joint (I smoked a lifetime’s worth of weed that summer… and part of the following decade). She said: “You guys should totally get a dog. What better place than a small farm out in the middle of nowhere?” Everything seems like a great idea after you’ve smoked a massive spliff. And so it is that only two weeks into our stay, we walked into Four Paws Only and walked out with a shy, grungy little dog that had been abandoned by his owners, chained to a fence in the backyard. The shelter manager had named him Shadow and although he was indeed our shadow his entire life, we changed his name to Dylan. And then we were three.

Latimer Street, Nelson, British Columbia
Autumn/Winter 2001
Soundtrack: Michael Franti – Stay Human (All the Freaky People); Gomez – Free to Run

Towards the end of the summer, K met a lovely woman named Catherine while volunteering on an urban garden in the centre of town. She had a small one-bedroom apartment for rent on the ground floor of her house. Shortly after two planes flew into the Twin Towers, as the days grew shorter and the nights got colder, we moved out of the cabin and into Catherine’s place.

It was at about this time that I was hired as a receptionist at the Nelson Animal Hospital. Incidentally, I got the job because I had adopted Dylan from their animal shelter next door and the shelter’s manager, Keira, had put in a good word for me. Again… happenstance. I’m telling you, the energy, you guys!

Our spot on Latimer Street backed up on miles upon miles of hiking trails. Dylan and I spent a lot of time up there. I once met a cougar tracker on those trails. She had a massive Redbone Coonhound for a dog. He was always taking off and she was always worried that a cougar really got him this time. She was a strange woman. I suppose you’d have to be a bit strange to go off on your own into the woods for days on end tracking cougars. But everyone was a little strange on some level in Nelson. That was part of the town’s charm.

K enrolled in a woodworking class and I took a creative writing course at KSA. I started boxing at the local gym at 6am a few days a week, went running by Sproule Creek, where I usually stopped halfway through to gorge on huckleberries (occasionally sharing a patch with a black bear), and when the snow started to fall (and did it ever fall), I learned to snowboard on Whitewater. And the festivals. Have I mentioned the music festivals? Starbelly Jam and Shambhala, where we danced the night away deep in the Kootenay mountain range until the sun came up.

In March, we were ready for our own space. Catherine’s spot was lovely but eventually we grew tired of washing our dishes in the shower and baking cookies in a toaster oven and we needed space to unpack all the boxes that we’d shipped from Montreal because we’d planned to settle down in this sleepy mountain town. 

Kokanee Avenue, Nelson, British Columbia
Spring/Summer 2002
Soundtrack:  Kinnie Starr – Sun Again; Bassnectar – Float

In the spring we moved into a small two-storey house with a huge back yard a short walk from town. We grew a garden. We drank lots of wine. We didn’t go out much any more. Kootenay Lake was at the end of our street and on hot summer nights, we sometimes walked down to the beach to cool down before bedtime. It was heavenly. That’s also the summer dad came to visit me.

We stayed on Kokanee Avenue until late September, when we decided to move back home. We spread all of our belongings out on the front lawn and sold them for pennies. For all the plans we’d made and all the love we had for Nelson, it was far too removed from both of our families. That year, in hindsight, was the beginning of the end of our relationship. Living in our own space had turned us into pot-smoking recluses and if it hadn’t been for our dog, Dylan, I think we would have split up long before we did (six years later).

I certainly let my freak flag fly in Nelson though, came home with dreadlocks and a lip ring, I did. Perhaps it wasn’t the most flattering look (there was no shortage of comments made about my appearance in my small hometown), but it was an experiment in exploring choices that weren’t mainstream.

In 2003, I wrote this about my time in Nelson: “I can’t thank this town enough for all the life lessons. It taught me what I didn’t want out of life. I was on the fast track towards yuppie ville and I’m so glad I stepped on the breaks and reversed. I now know that a simple life, love and nature are all I need.” Who is that woman? And how did I change so much in the past 15 years? The cynical side of me can’t help but think “Oh, what a load of flower-child crap.” But the truth is I do often long, especially since I’ve had Wren, for a more simple life. I sometimes feel like I’m disconnected from what’s real and important… too busy rushing around in the big city. I wonder if maybe I had it more figured out back then than I do now? But then again, I was stoned all the damn time. Of course life is grand when you’re snowboarding in the winter and skinny dipping in the summer and getting high every day. And I don’t want to get high every day. So maybe I just need to pluck a few of the old lessons and apply them to my life today. I think I’ll start with a garden.

*Seven years after leaving Nelson, I met a British guy named Joe and shortly after meeting, we realised that we’d both lived in Nelson at the exact same time. We like to imagine that we were both walking down Baker Street and I dropped my keys just as he was walking by, or maybe he crouched down to tie his shoelaces, and we were within touching distance of each other but I never saw him and he never saw me and Cupid, cheeky little Cupid, shot one of his arrows so that when we did cross paths again… we would instantly know. And we did.

You guys! Something AMAZING has happened. No, we didn’t win the lottery. No, I haven’t landed my dream job yet. No, we haven’t sold our house and found the perfect home! None of those amazing things happened, but the next best thing happened, which is that I found old blog posts, posts that I thought I’d lost forever, posts that were eaten up by a nasty virus in 2007 only to be spit out by the Wayback Machine last week. It felt like stumbling across my very own flux capacitor. Wayback Machine, I love you! I knew I’d written all about my gypsy years on the old blog and having to write about them all over again (with way fewer brain cells and little time to go down memory lane) brought up all the bitterness I’d felt at losing them nearly ten years ago. And then suddenly, there they were. Like magic. Wayback magic.

I was going to simply copy and paste what I’d written at the time but… Oh! I don’t think I can do it, you guys. Anything that starts with “the adventures of Bohemian Girl and Pagan Pal continue” makes me cringe and kind of want to hide under a rock, any rock, any object large enough to shield me from my 32-year-old hippie self (not that there’s anything wrong with hippies, I love hippies, it’s my mediocre writing that I have a problem with).

So I kept the facts, got rid of the fluff (so. much. fluff.) and adapted the text for 2016. Here we go, part three of all the places I’ve ever lived. If you fancy playing catch-up, here’s part one and part two.

Rue Fredmir, Pierrefonds, Québec
1997-1998
Soundtrack: Blackstreet – No Diggity; Barenaked Ladies – One Week

It had been almost a year since we’d graduated from uni and we were those students. The fresh-out-of-uni-jobless-twenty-somethings coming to grips with the fact that maybe their chosen degree wasn’t synonymous with a career in their chosen field and therefore facing the inevitable question — Fuuuuuuck! What do I do now? — that comes with that realisation. Graduating from university is a bit like being in a dark room for days on end and then coming out into a bright sunny day, blinded and a bit disoriented. I’d been a student for so long, I felt disillusioned by the real world.

My ex-boss offered me an office  job and K went back to work for Pfizer. We figured we’d make a bit of money then mosey on down to the next destination.We lived at his parent’s place while we figured it out, because we didn’t have a place to live or a pot to piss in. A while turned into a year, which was about nine months too long. Don’t get me wrong, K’s parents were the sweetest, most generous people I know but we mostly lived in his bedroom in the basement and it was so dark and cold down there that I actually had a hard time physically opening my eyes in the morning. The TV was always on, the air conditioning too. The lights were always off. Perhaps I was depressed. Was this the bright future I’d been waiting for?

We had to do something. We couldn’t live in that basement forever. So we started to scour the Ornithological Newsletter for internships, a last-ditch attempt at doing work that was related to our degrees. We figured it would be a stepping stone in the right direction.We found a scientist that was looking for two interns in Jamaica and we applied as a couple.

Cockpit Country, Jamaica
Spring 1998
Soundtrack: Bob Marley (of course) – Three Little Birds

I found this poem the other day, in my archives, on the old silver hard drive that threatens to die every time I boot it up. I wrote this poem in 2002, while living in Nelson, BC.  I was stoned a lot and taking Creative Writing at the Kootenay School of the Arts and I nearly shit myself every Tuesday night when I had to read my assignment out loud, in front of the entire class.

I lived this poem in the spring of 1998, while volunteering as an Avian Field Biologist for the Wildlife Preservation Trust. K and I spent three months roughing it in Cockpit Country, often regarded as Jamaica’s most inhospitable region, where we studied Yellow-Billed and Black-Billed Parrots. It was the first time I experienced being a minority and it is also where I became an expert at spotting, identifying and removing ticks in places one should never have to find and remove ticks, ever. I came out of it humbled and grateful for things we all take for granted, such as running water and electricity and not having to worry about a finding a giant centipede in your backpack.

This poem is not a staggering work of genius, far from it. But it’s the closest thing I have to describe the three months I spent in Jamaica, all those years ago.

Driving Home

I drive inland behind a small taxi
cramped with ten passengers
some hanging out of the windows,
past lobster huts and ice markets
where men lift frozen blocks
with picks like beaks of hawks.

I turn left at the last electrical pole
where shoeless children,
bare feet powdered with silt,
walk miles from school to home;
they wave and chase me down
narrow winding roads.

Past the local bar,
a rainbow painted shack
with a hot tin roof and Red Stripe on tap.
Blue smoke sways over dreadlocks,
over the woman with buttery cheeks
who tells jokes with a spirited belly laugh
while Leroy, red eyes stained with yellow veins,
rolls a fat reefer using a brown paper bag.

I cross the stone bridge over the river
where women scrub laundry
upstream from the neighbour’s rotting cow
until their fingers are raw,
until nothing is left but white.

Parrots fly overhead
whistling apple green wings
past ashen houses and burnt cane fields
where black stakes stand
and men carry sugar sticks on bare backs.

Two donkeys saunter
down the middle of the road.
I honk,
they pick up speed but stay
in the middle of the road.

Near home
boys climb coconut trees,
cattle egrets perch on brown cows,
Miss Rose, the English man’s maid
chases roosters and chickens
in a mustard-coloured year.

Sun burns into earth,
the blue tint of night swallows the jungle,
a thousand bats spill out of the wide mouth
of the cave up the hill
beetles fly with eyes lit like headlights,
the sky looks like a highway
a traffic jam of miniature cars.

Brown lizards flaunt egg yolk throats,
the ruby eyes of pottoo birds float
above fence posts.
Toads surface by the hundred,
fat and flat,
they cover the entire road.

They all lead me home.

Rue Fredmir, Pierrefonds, Québec
Summer 1998
Soundtrack: Jewel – Foolish Games

When we came back from Jamaica, we lived at my in-laws* again, partially to look after K’s mom while she recovered from an operation, but also because: no pot to piss in. We also realised that sitting under a tree in the jungle for eight hours, waiting for a parrot to fly in and out of its nest perhaps wasn’t the career we’d imagined for ourselves. Maybe I didn’t want to be the next Jane Goodall after all (nobody can be the next Jane Goodall, there’s only one Jane Goodall). Fuuuuuuck! What do I do now?

The previous year, when I’d returned from my Hawaiian internship and we’d taken a month-long road trip across Canada, we stopped in Calgary and ate a steak at Earl’s Kitchen. We hadn’t seen each other for months, we were fresh out of uni and high on life and the steak was so damn good and the wine too and we were chatting with the waitress who was telling us we should move to Calgary, the booming land of opportunity, a city built on oil and agriculture and internet technology, where yuppies and cowboys mingle at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. And that’s when a seed was planted. The seed stayed dormant for a year and then started to grow during the summer of 1998. By fall, the branches were overgrown and heavy with fruit, ripe for the picking. K’s brother knew a couple of people just outside of Calgary who offered us a place to stay and that settled it. We packed what we could into K’s car and headed west.

A trailer just outside of the Rockies, Alberta
Autumn 1998
Soundtrack: Jann Arden – Good Mother

We spent the autumn of 1998 in Bob and Brenda’s Jayco trailer on their land at the outskirts of the city. We helped in the greenhouse, planting and harvesting lettuce and basil, while we searched for a job. We spent a lot of time in their Jacuzzi, watching the sun set behind the mountains, smoking cigars (as one does) and drinking fine wines. The wonderful thing about having older friends is that they usually have refined taste and they introduce you to so much amazing shit! It is in that very hot tub that I fell in love with whiskey. It’s a love that will last a lifetime. We made homemade ravioli, went for hikes in Kananaskis, fed their pig, ate a lot of fresh lettuce and basil, walked their dog and met their niece Andrea and her husband Jeff (this serendipitous encounter will ultimately lead us to our next move).

I eventually got a job as a receptionist for an internet company in downtown Calgary, where I dressed the part (read: stupidly uncomfortable shoes) and spent my days repeating “Good morning/afternoon, Net Shepherd, how may I direct your call?” and drank way too many hazelnut-flavoured coffees. I worked with redneck Bills and Dicks who were quick to tell a woman where her place was but I learned to stand my ground in this land of macho, macho men. Kev waited tables and made fancy martinis in an upscale restaurant.

Eventually, winter set in and it got mighty cold in the camper van. It was time to leave our tin house and find a proper apartment.

16th Avenue SW, Calgary, Alberta
1998-1999
Soundtrack: Ani Difranco – Your Next Bold Move

Our apartment in Kensington Village was sparse. We didn’t own a single item of furniture. All we had was what we’d packed in the car. We borrowed one bright yellow couch for the living room, a pullout couch for our bedroom, a kitchen table and two chairs. Besides that, there was nothing. No art on the walls, nada. We may have had a TV that sat on a milk crate. The details are fuzzy. It was a long time ago. Christ, it was in the NINETIES!

We both walked to work every day, just across the Bow River, right in the city centre. We spent many nights at the Kensington Pub down the street, watched indie movies at the Plaza Theatre (I saw Life is Beautiful with a girl from work; it was the first time I’d ever watched a foreign movie), bought a shitload of used CDs, jogged along the river at 6am, did Tai-Bo (remember that?) at Heavens Fitness, ate breakfast at the Galaxie Diner most Saturday mornings and enjoyed about a thousand Kitchen Sink muffins from the Good Earth Cafe at the Eau Claire Market. Calgary, for us, was about making money and spending it. We made money, ate amazing food and made more money to eat more amazing food. We didn’t even bother to buy any furniture for our apartment because we were hardly ever there (might have had something to do with our crazy downstairs neighbour who banged on her ceiling every time I so much as farted in my sleep).

I got all my wisdom teeth pulled that year — I have a picture somewhere of me looking miserable, sat at our kitchen table, doing a puzzle, face puffy like a chipmunk storing nuts for the winter.

By April of 1999, we were done with Calgary (just like that) so we quit our jobs, packed up the car again and escaped. We drove down the west coast of the states, tasted wine in Sonoma, walked amongst giants in the Redwood National Park and felt equally small walking along Rodeo Drive, spent five bucks in Las Vegas, ate spicy burritos in New Mexico, hiked down the Grand Canyon… and headed on to our next destination (via another quick pit stop at the in-laws).

Herkimer Street, Hamilton, Ontario
November 1999 – April 2001
Soundtrack: Rage Against the Machine – Killing in the Name; Sarah Harmer – Basement Apartment; Paul Oakenfold – Silence (Delirium)

Our next destination, of all places, was Hamilton a.k.a. The Hammer, Ontario. During the summer of ’99, we visited Jeff and Andrea, who had moved from Calgary to Hamilton and we thought “Hey, this looks like a nice place to live.” I must have been desperate for change to think that Hamilton looked like a nice place to live. Don’t get me wrong, it has its charms, but I might have thought otherwise had I driven past this prior to moving there: steel town. Explains why we found black suet on your windowsills most mornings and why I suddenly developed a mild case of asthma (which I’d never had before living there and which has since left). Having said that, I do like to believe that things happen for a reason and although The Hammer wasn’t paradise, it was the Universe’s chosen location for some serendipitous encounters, friends I still cherish to this day. 

Hamilton was the hub of our yuppie years. I was a Coordinator for the Planned Giving department at McMaster University (read: drinking lots of tea and asking elderly alumni if they’d like to leave a little something for McMaster in their wills). K was a fitness consultant at Curzon’s Fitness, making an insane amount of cash doing next to nothing.

We lived on the second floor of a house and the downstairs tenant was none other than our landlady. She was a small, wiry, Greek lady. She must have been in her 70s but had the energy of a 30-year-old. She’d walk on her heels, bang, bang, bang, from one end of her apartment to the other, bang, bang, bang, like a drill sergeant, and her bedroom was right beneath ours so we had the pleasure of hearing her clear her throat every night just as we were getting ready for bed, as if to say “In case you feel like having sex, just know that I’m right under you and I can hear you.” I can assure you nothing kills the mood more than knowing that a 70-year old lady is listening to your every move.

We did enjoy some things in Hamilton. Like going to the Locke Street Bakery on Saturday mornings for fresh bagels and meeting up with Jeff and Andrea on Thursday nights to share a couple of pitchers and way too many spicy 10-cent chicken wings at the Gown & Gavel Pub.

I joined a triathlon group. I trained like a mofo, running, swimming, spinning, several times a week with the ultimate goal of participating in the Around the Bay 30km Road Race, which I completed in March of 2001.

On the weekends, after training, we’d smoke weed in the attic so that our landlady wouldn’t catch a whiff and evict us. I went to my first rave while living in Hamilton. My life was a dichotomy.

We were making more money than we’d ever made (and ever would for the next decade) but we felt empty. I was 25 years old, attending conferences, preparing financial illustrations, giving seminars about bequests and working 60 hour weeks. I felt like Edward Norton in Fight Club. You know the scene where he’s lying on his couch floating in a world of IKEA furniture? That was us. Our IKEA nesting instinct had taken over and we felt psychologically castrated by our jobs.

“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple of years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

I was Jack’s raging bile duct and I needed to get the hell out. So in the spring of 2001, we did what we do best. We packed all of our IKEA possessions, stored them and hit the road. We had loose plans. We thought we’d end up in Vancouver where there was a potential job waiting for me, but on the day of my 26th birthday, we crossed a bright orange bridge and entered a town called Nelson, nestled in the mountains. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that it had just finished raining and the end of a bright rainbow pointed right there, in the lake under the bridge and I, naturally, saw it as a sign. We stopped in Nelson and didn’t go any further.

Within a couple of months I went from wearing high-heeled shoes and corporate suits to living a simple back-to-the-land barefooted hippie life, volunteering on an organic farm and adopting a dog named Dylan. Next up: the Nelson years.

*Note: The term “in-law” is used loosely in Québec, whether you’ve been dating a guy for six months or you’re married to him, his parents pretty much become your in-laws the moment you meet them.