THE VILLA

We called it our villa. 

Not in public, but together, drinking shitty wine on the countertop we’d constructed from an old door on top of garbage cans. 

Or that time, when I was crying on the floor, 8 months pregnant, having just impaled my middle finger with a splinter of wood right under the damn fingernail while sanding trim from the 1800’s. I believe I raised said finger and screamed ‘fuck you, villa!’ to the sky, to the barren field, to my unborn child. 

Or that time we carried the claw food tub up the stairs. Another find from the free section on Craigslist. Me sweating/swearing (newly, unexpectedly pregnant) you singing Barrington Levy. 

Or that time David the Drunken Carpenter, a neighbour, turned hired hand, turned fired hand, was wasted when he installed our bedroom window and we awoke to fireflies and bats inside our bedroom. Of the two of us, I became the bat capturer and releaser – maybe because I’m an air sign.

Or that first summer, when we knew nothing about nothing, and I planted a garden in late August even though the farmers laughed and I should have known better when the greenhouse guy gave me all the plants for free. It was an excuse to be in the soil, to feel like I had control over one, tiny part of the villa. All the plants died, but the mint still thrives there. 

Or that first night, when we pulled in with our city moving truck, filled with things we’d found on Toronto street corners. After your Mom had tried to mop and disinfect and scrub the abandoned out of the house. When the truck got stuck in the grass as tall as we were because we didn’t realize that’s what happens to unhinged grass in the country in July. You joked about Jamaica, and told stories about cutlasses in Patois. 

Our villa. 

We came to this island for a new years eve party at an old friends new/old farm. The hardship of this place eventually broke that farm and marriage up – though I’m told the horses are still there. We were enchanted by the snow and the bucolic beauty, though I didn’t know that word then, and truthfully am disgusted by it. A word that means beautiful shouldn’t sound like that. Pastoral is better. Utopian, even. This place was endless inspiration for animal memes and Thoreau-inspired poetry, even though memes hadn’t been conceived then. So, we - tiny artist- children, idealistic baby-adults - rented a house for a month here to make a record. A place away from the city, where our crew could come and drink too much and make too much noise. In the last days of that month, we went for a drive and saw the villa. 

4000 square feet of abandoned, uninsulated, double brick farm house with three ancient maple trees out front and 11 acres of farm land out back. One of those trees would die two years later. There was no kitchen. No bathroom. No heating. Dead animals inside (especially birds, which I took as a bad omen maybe because I’m an air sign). A for sale sign on the lawn. It was a power of sale property – lost by some shady contractors who were in the middle of renovating it poorly, when the financial world collapsed in 2008. It was cheap. We were cheaper. We were artists, and looked terrible on paper. You mom was with us, and suggested (innocently) that we make an offer as a “life experience” to “understand the housing market.” We all knew that we would never get the house so we followed your mothers’ orders (she is hard to say no to) and put an offer in. 

We left our rental house and went back to the city. I was playing gigs and working at a breakfast restaurant the size of a one-lane bowling alley – narrow, with bacon greased wallpaper. You called. You called again. You called again. I answered, while my misogynistic, too skinny, too caffeinated boss glared. 

It turned out that the man who owned the house, also held the mortgage on the house. It turned out he had started a private mortgage company with money left to him by his brother who had died. It turned out that this brother was in the Canadian Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It turned out that he had a soft spot in his heart for musicians. It turned out there were 9 other offers on the house. 

It turned out that we got it. The house, that is.

I threw up. 

In the condo we lived in there was an aerial photo of our Toronto neighbourhood. It featured about six square blocks. There was not one patch of green on that photo. 

Six weeks later, after emptying the storage unit we’d filled with every single piece of trash we found on street corners, dumpsters, yard sales and craigslist, we left the city. 

We arrived in the middle of the night and dragged our mattress through the neck-high grass. I don’t remember which of the many rooms we slept in. All I remember is the silence and noise as one – the quiet so full like a terrarium housing all the sounds of the world inside it. I lay awake in terrified awe. We had done something truly insane and I knew it. 

The next morning, I walked the rooms over and over and watched the light. I tried to memorize the compass of light and dark, how it hit the walls, how it warmed the rooms. I thought about the women who had done the same before me on these floors for a hundred years. I had altered history – my own and many others’ - by becoming a part of this space. I sat in the sun, and wrote.