Open House
CBC Books | | Posted: May 28, 2020 11:36 PM | Last Updated: May 28, 2020
Jane Christmas
Moving house has never flustered author Jane Christmas. She loves houses: viewing them, negotiating their price, dreaming up interior plans, hiring tradespeople to do the work and overseeing renovations. She loves houses so much that she's moved thirty-two times.
There are good reasons for her latest house move, but after viewing sixty homes, Jane and her husband succumb to the emotional fatigue of an overheated English housing market and buy a wreck in the town of Bristol that is overpriced, will require more money to renovate than they have and that neither of them particularly like.
As Jane's nightmare renovation begins, her mind returns to the Canadian homes where she grew up with parents who moved and renovated constantly around the Toronto area. Suddenly, the protective seal is blown off Jane's memory of a strict and peripatetic childhood and its ancillary damage — lost friends, divorces, suicide attempts — and the past threatens to shake the foundations of her marriage. This latest renovation dredges a deeper current of memory, causing Jane to question whether in renovating a house she is in fact attempting to renovate her past.
With humour and irreverence, Open House reveals that what we think we gain by constantly moving house actually obscures the precious and vital parts of our lives that we leave behind.
This is a memoir that will appeal to anyone whose pulse quickens at the mere mention of real estate. (From Patrick Crean Editions).
From the book
I cannot live in our home anymore. We have to move.
The Husband and I face one another at the security cordon of London's Gatwick Airport. These words have not yet sprung from my lips; they remain in my head, though they have also spilled onto a missive, crafted in careful language, which is folded and tucked under my husband's pillow at home. It awaits his patient reading and will demand his complete understanding and action. I am asking a lot of him, because unlike me he is a creature of routine and stability. He does not like change. He does not like moving. Less than two years earlier, I had promised him that this was it; that we would not move again for a very, very long time. But now that promise must be broken.
Back when the promise was made it had been a reasonable, heartfelt one. We had just endured a level of home-buying stress that had all the bewildering confusion of a pantomime and none
of the hilarity. England's convoluted system of buying and selling houses is not built for gentle constitutions, which goes some way in explaining why Britons are one of the least mobile and most risk-averse cultures on earth.
As a Canadian, I am made of hardier stuff: I enjoy moving house. No, let me rephrase that: I love moving house. I love the search for a new home, the packing up and the subsequent assessment and de-cluttering of all that I own, when old and new face off in a fight to survive the charity shop box. I love planning a new space, designing and styling the interior, thumbing through stacks of paint and fabric swatches. I love the ruminating, the budgeting, the logistical organization, the legal details involved in a title search. I have even grown to enjoy (with the exception of our last move) the chaos that is part and parcel of the moving experience.
From Open House by Jane Christmas. Published by Patrick Crean Editions ©2020