Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 1

Mount Pleasant is quite a large jurisdiction in Vancouver.  I had the good fortune of finding a place to live in the most beautiful part of this district, in a neighbourhood of small mansions on streets lined with towering trees.  In this tall dark green house of Edwardian vintage I came to rest in a small housekeeping room.  It was simple, basic and beautiful.  It once served as a bedroom for likely a succession of young sons and young daughters of the immediate offspring of the founding bourgeois of Vancouver.  The white walls and the bare wooden floor held the mysterious invisible traces of unknown feet and hands that had been there before me.  A huge bay window of the second floor room dominated the wall and looked out to an enormous spreading tree.  To the left of the window a small alcove had been covered in square blue ceramic tiles surrounding a counter, sink, gas stove and white cupboards.  The fridge was on the other side of the room near the door.  I would again be sharing the bathroom with other tenants but the rent was almost scandalously cheap.

I was recovering from Dilaram.  I was recovering from being on call and on duty twenty-four/seven, and I was especially in need of recovery from trauma.  I had been expelled, dishonorably.  I was thrown out on the street in the middle of the night and all because the leader of this so called Christian community was a nasty little Napoleon who must be obeyed and whose will would not be questioned.  I also suspect that he was a closet case, in love with me, and enraged by my rejection of him.  Not only has hell no fury like a woman scorned.  I was very fortunate that my mother was available and ready to take me in that night.

I stayed with her for six weeks, the longest I had lived with her since I first began to live independently five years ago.  My supervisor at work helped me move and he joked that this would likely not be the last time I would be living with mumsy.  How wrong he was.  It wasn't much of a job.  I was delivering flyers fulltime for minimum wage but it was honest work and it helped get my mind off of my sadness.  I felt like a complete failure leaving Dilaram, and this is a splendid example of the twisted and perverted power of cults.  I felt that I had left of my own volition, that I had disobeyed God and that the only way I could restore my broken relationship with God would be by returning in repentance and putting myself under the authority of Dan Gardener.  I knew this was both irrational and toxic.  I felt unable to appreciate nature or beauty because I no longer was walking with God.  I had to force myself to rebel against this thinking.  I was getting plenty of news about Dilaram on the bush telegraph.  He had turned into a particularly harsh, vicious and nasty dictator and lives were being ruined by him.

I remember my first evening there.  C. had taken the rooms next door and once again we were neighbours.  I had her over for dinner, my first meal there: home-made whole wheat flour chapattis filled with spinach and melted cheese and chai to drink.

I don't think I have ever lived in such a simply or spartanly furnished place.  I had for a bed a foam mattress covered with my single remaining Indian bedspread against the far wall.  Facing the bay window was a large solid desk and a white wooden and black leather old fashioned farm chair.  The desk was a gift from friends.  The chair came from the Famous Canadian Artist.  I kept my dresser in the large closet.  Covering the left and right panes of the bay window were highly coloured old fashioned drapes with designs of palm leaves and flowers.  The walls were adorned with
Chagall's Blue Violinist:  

and Van Gogh's Sunflowers:

The wall above my bed was covered by a square hanging of Fijian tapa bark cloth:
 I was really cool! ;-}

The wooden floor was partially covered by two straw tatami mats.  In a corner I also had a make-shift bookshelf for my literary treasures.

I bought a pentagonal crystal that I hung in the window.  The afternoon sun would shine in through the leaves of the tree and cast rainbows all over my room.

While writing on my typewriter (remember those?) at my desk I would observe the tree outside as the buds became swollen and long catkins began to descend from the twigs.  I didn't know what kind of tree it was.  Small red flowers appeared and then the leaves began to grow and swell and break out of the tender buds.  Small birds would appear on the branches, especially house finches: (see image at bottom)

It eventually became clear that the tree was a black walnut or butternut tree. 

 The nuts were edible, delicious and hard to crack but worth it.  There was Bartlett pear tree in the back yard and in the fall I would harvest the pears and stew and spice them.  There were also delicious plums growing there.

I remember the huge thunder storm during my first spring there and the most powerful thunderclap I had ever heard.  It shook the house and I found myself on my knees in awe and reverence before God.  I knew then that already I was beginning to heal from my trauma.

In early July I lay on my bed napping while listening to classical music on the radio.  The most wonderful fragrance, a heavy, musky but not oppressive and incredibly delightful smell of perfume.  I lay in the most delicious delirious torpor.  The afternoon sun filtered through the summer leaves and cast golden white lozenges and ovals of light on my ceiling, embroidered by little spectrums of colour from the prism in the window.  The music was perhaps Vivaldi or Telemann.  I did not want to move.  But I had to find out the source of this incredibly intense perfume.  I pulled myself up, put on some shoes and went outside, following the fragrance.  I traced it, two blocks away.  The glorious smell was coming from a linden tree in full flower.  I was overcoming trauma:










Here is an image of one of the many house finches I saw perching in the branches of the butternut tree just outside my window: