If you asked Rosie, she would have said it was the perfect weather. When you get up in the morning, walk outside, and when exhale you can see your breath, then you look past your breath to the world beyond, and everything is still. The grass is just slightly crispy

The water was always dark to me. I would stand on the shoreline, bundled in the coarse wool sweater Grandma had bought me at the Granville Island market, watching my father watch the sea. He never knew I was there. Not unless I spoke. And sometimes even still he wouldn’t

Slugs. Slimy, revolting, gag-inducing, leaf-and-fruit-munching, plant-murdering slugs! I had arrived at my garden plot early that morning—with the sun only just cresting the tops of the houses to find that a small army of the bulbous black mollusks were advancing through my territory, leaving glistening slime trails crisscrossing the dark

It wasn’t the shag carpets or the original stove that dripped black grease onto the linoleum. Nor was it the fifty-year-old sliding windows that housed leggy spiders creating webs between the panes and those giant furry black houseflies that hatched out of the walls every spring. It was the view!