A New Home

By Walter Kish

Just over a month ago, my wife and I took possession of our new home in Oshawa.  It was the seventh “home” we have moved into during the course of our married life, and somehow, I think the chances are good that it won’t be our last. 

Five of our moves can be classified as lifestyle upgrades.  Our first home was a small one bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto, the location determined primarily by the fact that my wife was still finishing her last year at the University of Toronto.  A year later, with both of us employed we moved to bigger and fancier digs in the form of a spacious two bedroom apartment in a new complex in Scarborough called Crescent Town.

That too was temporary, lasting only long enough until we could save up enough for a down payment on our own house.  If you are raised up as a Ukrainian, you are inculcated from the earliest age with the firm belief that you will never achieve success and respect until you own your own piece of land and roof over your head.  And so, as soon as we could afford to do so financially, we went looking for our own “hospodarstvo” and found it in Bloor West Village, a few blocks from High Park, and at that time home to one of Toronto’s largest Ukrainian communities. 

In the late seventies, this area was still affordable to young couples starting out, something that became increasingly problematic as the eighties and nineties came and went.  The area became progressively more gentrified and house prices soared, with the cost of a detached house in good condition in the area now within spitting distance of a million bucks.  Last year, my brother in law paid more than $600,000 for a small semi-detached in the northern reaches of Bloor West, close to Dundas Street. 

We lived for more than a decade in this desirable and interesting neighbourhood, characterized by a polyglot of cultures, established and well-treed streets, turn of the century solid brick architecture, convenient local butchers, bakers, fruit and vegetable stores, an abundance of parks and green spaces, and excellent schools.  Unfortunately, by the time our third child came along, it was clear that the house was far too small to meet our needs, so we sold and moved to a house more than twice the size in a new development east of Toronto in the town of Pickering.

It was there that our kids grew up and where most of my married life has been spent, interrupted pleasantly by two stints of living in Ukraine, the first in 1993 – 1994, and recently from 2004 – 2007.  Prior to our most recent peregrination to Ukraine, we sold our house in Pickering since all of our brood had passed into adulthood and moved away from home to establish their own lives outside the family nest.

During our time in Ukraine, the accumulated artifacts of our married life were put away in storage, awaiting the next chapter of our future life.  These past few weeks have been full of joyful little discoveries as my wife and I unpack and find things that we had forgotten we had.  Of course, these sentimental treasures are more than overweighed by all the stuff we had stored away that we look at now and wonder why we didn’t throw them away a long time ago.

There is one interesting and somewhat ironic though strangely appropriate note to our recent house purchase.  Our real estate agent was a charming and exceptionally competent lady by the name of Natalia Halenda, an immigrant from Ukraine who came to Canada in the aftermath of Ukraine’s independence in the early nineties.  Through dogged determination, persistence and hard work, she has become one of Oshawa’s most successful real estate agents. So upon returning from Ukraine to Canada, we were assisted in buying our house by a Ukrainian who not that long came to Canada to find a new home of her own.  Canada certainly provides wonderful opportunities!