Our Garden In The SkY!

We are in the fortunate possession of a balcony in our apartment in the beautiful city of Vancouver in the beautiful province of British Columbia. Vancouver is located in the most happy country of Canada. You can understand from my preamble that I feel immense gratitude that my Bride and I are resident here. Many of you out there may have similar feelings about the locale you inhabit. Why not? That is a good reason for gratitude.

Indeed, my story is mainly about gratitude. Oh joy, O rapture uncontained!

Before we came to Vancouver, my Bride and I, then in our early seventies, shortly after our marriage, fled abroad, spending almost ten years in Dublin, Ireland. How we came to be there is another story, and I will not digress. On arriving there we encountered a very hot market for rental accommodation. There were line-ups and bidding at every rental site we found. We were lucky to find a small apartment within our means. We remained in that apartment the whole of our time in Ireland. Would you believe that some years the rent we paid actually went down?

Our sojourn in Ireland was enjoyable and we forged friendships that are alive and well even today, many years after the event. We became more knowledgeable about the turbulent history of that country, the richness of its culture, the contributions to the world of its poets and writers. Who can forget Shaw, Yeats, Oscar Wilde and Swift? My writing efforts were marked by the “stream of consciousness” ideas of James Joyce. And, of course, Irish pubs are a delight, with the friendliness of the people, enhanced by all the music that is sure to be on display.

But more relevant to this narrative was our experience with our accommodation.

 Our fifth floor apartment had only two “small” windows, one in each room of our domicile. It was not grand. Whenever we wished to observe the great outdoors, without descending five floors, we would find a perch on a window sill to view the River Liffey and the traffic passing on both sides of its walled shores. There was no traffic on the River itself. That was our limited view of the external world from our apartment. We went out and about almost every day.

When we came to Vancouver from Ireland, looking for an apartment that might be our residence when we moved back to Canada, my Bride made a great point of insisting that whatever we chose, it had to have a balcony. I remember insisting that it had to have many large windows. We did not connect these things with our Irish experience at the time. But today, I fully appreciate how our Irish living conditions dictated our choices.

I say this because I have observed how our balcony has become the occasion for a small vacation away from home, particularly on the sunny days. We do not feel driven to escape the confines of our apartment. We have a view of ocean and mountains, and the flowers I have planted on our balcony. My favorite flower for display is the red geranium, and we have a generous multi-colored display of fall-planted tulips in the spring combined with a continuous rotation of annuals to provide variety. We often spend spare time on the balcony itself, when we are not able to parade the sights of the Sea Wall at ocean’s edge. We are grateful for our balcony as our private hide-away, supplementing our small apartment space.

During the summer we are sheltered by the overhanging branches of a large tree situated just below us. Some apartment dwellers in this city find the summer heat intolerable, because, units (ours, like many others,) have large expanses of window to facilitate viewing the beautiful outdoors. The heat of the sun can make interiors without air-conditioning uncomfortable. While we have generous sunlight in the winter, our leafy coverage spares us summer problems.  We have about one hour of full sun in the summer if we wish to sun-bathe.

Am I sounding like a real-estate agent? I am totally ignoring some of the grim rainy days of the fall and winter. We will celebrate the spring and summer, shall we, and concentrate on that?

Come and visit us anytime, join us for a drink and enjoy all the sights, the sounds, perhaps the aromas we may have on offer, in our garden in the sky.