Our Story: Part 7 - Leaving Muskoka

We continued to dream of leasing a little space to make our own, and we continued to badger the landlord about long-term solutions. He was a landlord we wanted to stick with!

Sometime in early May, he informed us officially that he would not be able to accommodate us long term, as the fire code wouldn’t allow him to split the space into smaller units.

On the heels of this news, everything changed one night as we were preparing for our first canoe trip of the season. the funny thing is, it was the first trip we’d planned since moving to Muskoka! Part of our dream of living in such a beautiful place was to be closer to this activity that is so dear to our hearts, and yet we realized a year and a half in that we still hadn’t been on a trip! We were on the eve of changing that, and it would begin with buying a used canoe the next morning before hitting the lakes.

Then there was a knock at the door.

Our landlord stood there, looking distraught. Probably wanting to get the whole ordeal over with, he blurted out the news that his daughter had sold her house and needed a place to live. Our place.

“She’s family, but you’re like family too, so I don’t know what to do!” He said.

We were stunned, so we reassured him, closed the door, and did our best to think through the situation. The canoe trip was off, and the canoe we dreamt of buying would have to wait.

Being evicted shakes something in you. Your whole sense of security and belonging is brought into question, and the feeling of rejection runs deep.

We took the night to think it over, and by morning we’d made the decision to move in with Phil’s parents in Kitchener-Waterloo for the summer, just until we could get things figured out. I told myself we might be back, but I knew it wasn’t true. We were leaving for good.

We took turns hiking the 100 acre property by ourselves, saying good-bye to the life we’d thought we wanted. I remember crying by myself in a patch of trilliums, freshly bloomed in the spring sun. I was devastated, but something in both of us knew that this was right. We didn’t belong there, as badly as we wanted to make it fit. It hurt, as even good decisions sometimes do, but there was relief as well.

Thus it was that by June 1st we found ourselves in Kitchener-Waterloo, a little bruised and tired, but otherwise ready for the next chapter.

And we went back for several healing canoe trips that summer. ;)

Lindsay