Thirty years ago

February 15, 2026

It occurred to me when I was making my cappuccino just now that it was 30 years ago this weekend that Mike and I took possession of our house here on the island.

The house had originally been a small cabin – kitchen, livingroom, small bedroom (made smaller by a huge and hideous built in wardrobe) and bathroom. At some point when it was the home of an elderly Scottish widow, and extension had been built – a large front room off the livingroom with a semi-finished basement underneath it.

The weekend we moved our things in we discovered something we’d somehow failed to notice during our two viewings – the large front room (which we’d decided to make the bedroom) and the basement did not have a single electricity socket anywhere. So the first tradesman whose acquaintance we made was an electrician. By the time we came back for our next weekend visit (we were still living and working in Vancouver), we had plugs.

Somewhere I have a small stack of photos of the interior as it was then – the horrible dark fake wood panelling in the livingroom and bathroom, the horrible light fake wood panelling in the kitchen and original bedroom. I did a lot of painting those first weekends. If I knew where the photos were, I’d scan them, but I don’t know.

As I’ve written about before, on the 10^th anniversary of the purchase, we remortgaged to get some extra money to do some long planned renovations. And an exterior paint job.

For nearly half those 30 years the house has been mine alone. I fully expected my next move to be in a box. And now here I am, living somewhere else with a lovely man, my lovely cat and his often quite lovely dog.

I haven’t moved out completely. I am in the process (which began last year with boxes and boxes of books) of downsizing and trying to figure out how we’re going to fit all the things I do want to keep into this already pretty full house.

I now have a room that’s half way to becoming my study.

One of the things I really do need sooner rather than later is my filing cabinet, as there are things beginning to pile up here that really do need to be filed.

So, one afternoon last week I went over to sort it out – empty the drawers and put the contents into banker’s boxes so it will be light enough to move in the back of Dirk’s car. The top drawer was easy peasy – all my stuff, mostly cuttings and other work-related material. The bottom drawer – oh, my god. I’d already done some work on that (2008-2015 tax returns and receipt folders emptied and shredded). I thought I’d dealt a long time ago with things of Mike’s that had been in the bottom drawer, but it turned out I hadn’t. Bloody hell. Worked on it for half an hour, then fled.

Back to it yesterday. I started here.

The hardest was the legal folder – all the correspondence from his son’s lawyer after his son (and executor) decided, contrary to the promise he made me the day after Mike died, that he would not pay off his father’s biggest debt, but instead dump it on me. Tough read even 15 years later.

I got this far before I started to lose the will to live.