Greetings from House Usher

I told the lover that we would officially be home in this house when we could watch our first horror movie with all the lights off. Why not the old House of Usher of 1960 with Vincent Price, since I nicknamed the house of my in-laws in homage to the famous story of Edgar Allan Poe?

But the first night after the move, surrounded by boxes to unpack and completely exhausted, we weren’t yet tuned into the TV. So I chose to reread The Fall of House Usher in the hot water of the old clawfoot tub on the second floor. Roderick Usher was still pale and sickly as his sister tossed about in her grave. I had a hard time finishing the short story, because I had forgotten how comfortable these deep bathtubs are and how conducive to sleep, even drowning.

This house lives up to its nickname, it looks like a small decrepit mansion, where you “go up” to sleep upstairs, while I have the impression of hearing ghosts in the basement. “I retire to my apartments,” the lover jokes when he goes to bed at night.

I can’t believe we live here now, and maybe for the rest of our lives. For six months, we lived between two roofs, in works and moving boxes, an adventure that I have told you about in these pages for about ten chronicles. I could have written fifty easily, the subject opens a lot of doors. I don’t know how we did it, and it’s far from over, we haven’t even put up the curtains yet. It’s not easy, inheriting a century-old house filled to the ceiling with objects, as happened to my lover after the death of his parents. There is something deeply emotional about this, in full mourning. I said it from the start: I was terrified and completely unprepared for this.

Writing the Usher House chronicles was a form of therapy, my boyfriend believes. A way to convince myself, when I was plagued by doubt.

This adventure took place against the backdrop of a worsening housing crisis, and without this crisis, I am not sure that we would be here. We were happy in our apartment, the rent of which was affordable. But for how long ? What will Montreal’s rental stock look like in just one year? I continue to watch with dismay the price of apartments for rent – ​​I know someone who has just received a $300 increase in their rent – ​​because I am worried about what this crisis will create for society. This is an issue close to my heart.

For the first time in my life in Montreal, I have a roof where no one can kick me out and under which I set my own rules. Angie, my little shih tzu, by her distant Chinese imperial lineage, already acts like a princess. She has quickly created her routine in her new quarters, and we obey her.

The lover is giving me big eyes because I’m eyeing cat shelters. I could now go crazy for cats and nobody could help it. Except Angie, if she refuses the intruders.

All that to say that the project of Quebec solidaire to challenge the clauses of leases where it is forbidden to have pets, I am for. It has been banned in Ontario since 1990. It is completely unfair that citizens are deprived of this happiness and that they struggle to find a home when they love an animal, while others can have 12 cats if they want it . In the current context, we guess that the shelters will be overwhelmed in July. That can not continue.

I made my first family supper, with my mother and my brother. When my mother walks into this house built in 1875, which has changed little, she travels back in time. It looks exactly like the rooming houses she lived in with her grandmothers when she was a child. That is to say, different tenants lived under the same roof, having only one room to pay as rent, sharing common areas such as the kitchen and the bathroom. It was the solution for people with very precarious status, and rooming houses have not stopped disappearing over the years. The recent story of literary critic Jean-Roch Boivin, who died shortly after being evicted from his rooming house, is a sad illustration of this.

My mother grew up surrounded by love, but in great poverty. She and her grandmothers lived together in the equivalent of my bedroom. Every time I enter this new home, I have this burning awareness of the social ladder. And of course, when I receive my mother, I receive her like a queen.

I’m not yet used to the sounds of this creaking old house. And since we had an orgy of horror movies as soon as we had TV, I get scared at the slightest sound, while telling myself that no one can come in here without being heard with these groaning floors. What surprises me more, in fact, is the silence. The quality of this silence in the middle of the city, after having lived all my life with neighbors on my head or under my feet. I continue to be careful when I walk. There are people who have never experienced that, blows from the broom to the ceiling.

A couple of pigeons have taken up permanent residence under a cornice and they keep shitting on one of the walls of the facade. I asked someone what to do to fix it, and he replied that the only solution is to kill them, because they would transmit the location of the nest to their descendants. So I think we’re going to wash this wall often, or else give our future guests the following indications: “It’s the house with a trace of pigeon droppings. »

It was in this house that we spent our first night together, the lover and I, almost 25 years ago, when he was still living with his parents, who had then gone to the countryside. It’s written in my diary that I found while making the boxes. I arrived at his house in the middle of the night in a taxi, heart pounding, because we had experienced love at first sight during a previous meeting. Here is what I told myself in 1998: “I arrive in front of a house that I do not know, on a street where I have never been. I see red hair in a warmly lit living room. A loneliness waiting to be broken. I go in, it takes me to the guts. A smell of incense, works of art everywhere, an incredible house. A piano, lots of books, black cats. And him. In the space of a moment, I wanted to leave everything, to give up my whole life. »

Instinct or fate? Let’s say that one often leads to the other.

In this place, I feel like in a Hammer film. And I have to write the credits of this film which could not have existed without several essential characters. First of all Uncle Michel, who convinced us to take the leap and who helped us in every possible way. Our friends Carl and Amélie, my brother and my mother, the booksellers Bruno Lalonde and François Côté, the notary Mariana Valentin Mocelin, the movers from Plan pas con, the plumber Mohammed, our pruning neighbor Derek… and Isabelle Audet, who was my boss at the start of this adventure, and who enthusiastically made this series of chronicles possible.

Impossible to forget my in-laws Mo and Djo who bequeathed this heritage to us. We talk about them every day because we see them around every corner.

Finally, there is also you, dear readers. Your encouragement and advice have really helped me through the past few months. Thanks to you, I didn’t need a shrink. So I owed you this last column, written from the House of Usher, as a fee.

While I’m writing, the hot water heaters hum, the sun comes in through the skylight of my little office where my books have followed me, you feel outside that it will soon be spring, the season of renewal.