Gonna be a hot one!

As we enter a heat wave out here on the West Coast (Best Coast!) I am reminded of the hot days of summer as a child in the 80’s. All the neighbours had a pool, and my childhood friend and I would climb to the top of our treehouse and stare at the refreshing blue pools on either side of our back yard. We longed for an invitation to jump the fence and join the other splashing kids in their perfect oasis. I remember feeling a bit underprivileged that we were one of the few families on the street without a pool. At the time, little did I realize how lucky we really were. We could hear the other kids playing Marco-Polo from our spot perched up high and wished with all our might we could join them. After a while we’d venture to the corner store on our bicycles and get jumbo freezies and a loot bag for 25 cents and return to the treehouse again, waiting for an invitation that never came.

Pools are a rare thing out here on Vancouver Island compared to my childhood back in Gatineau Quebec. But, when the thermometer peaks above a balmy 25 degrees, I remember the hot days with fondness and an appreciation now, for what we really had. A neighbourhood where I could walk into the home of my other “pool-less” family and saddle up to the table and my “Neighbourhood Mom” would ask me what I wanted for lunch. They always had an open bag of ruffle chips in the summer and an endless supply of Ovaltine in the winter. The door was always open for us to come and go as we pleased. I even got on the weekend roster of house hold chores I was there so much. Nobody minded, it was just our other home. And, ours was theirs.

We had never ending evenings and afternoons of playing hide-and-go-seek even with the “pool owning” neighbourhood kids and our parents migrated from one backyard to another during what I now recognize as happy hour while we all played until dark without anyone checking on us.

This open, friendly, neighbourhood-community feeling is something that has evolved on our street here in Sidney. I will say that I now feel like the luckiest, most privileged person ever to live in such a great community. Only, we’re the parents now enjoying happy hour and our kids are the ones who probably feel a bit underprivileged. Is this the cycle of life? As a parent to all teens, I suspect this will be the case for some time to come.

These childhood memories of living on a street rich with friendship is something I think about when I help my clients purchase their first home. Will they have awesome neighbours and build lifetime friendships like my parents did? Will they have that person down the hall, or down the street they can borrow an egg from mid recipe? Or, a bag of ice from minutes before their house fills with guests and they find two empty ice cube trays in the freezer?

I hope for all my clients that they discover neighbours who enrich their lives like we have. Whether it’s a heat wave, a pandemic, snow storm or power outage, your neighbours are the ones you can lean on and spend time with when the world shuts down, or gets really, really hot! Invite that neighbour over this weekend, you might be fence to fence with a friend for life.