A Place

October 14, 2025

If I look out the window of my study, which is a little above my head when I’m sat at my chair, I see the corner of my detached garage, including its narrow, metal chimney; a segment of the power and telephone lines that come from the back alley; and the branch-ends of my neighbour’s gigantic trees, of which there are three or four or five or six depending on how you choose to count trees. The leaves that are left on the branches are yellow with smudges of green, and the leaves that are no longer on the branches are all over the dead grass and piled up against the chain-link fence that separates my driveway from the backyard. But those last few things I can’t see unless I stand up.

The garage sits behind the house; it’s a double garage, but each side opens in a different direction: one toward the front of the house, and the other toward the back alley. The path from the garage to the back alley, however, is blocked by a compost roller, two vegetable beds, and a nascent potato patch. That side of the garage contains our patio furniture (stored for the winter), all my tools, a bike rack I made that looks like a crucifix, our camping gear, and a box of recyclables kept in case kids ever come by for a bottle drive again. We only have one car, a grey Nissan Versa that you can park anywhere.

It’s snowing at the moment, but it rained earlier, so it’s inconsequential. Still, this is the first snowfall of winter. We bought some new snow shovels yesterday; all we had when we lived in the apartment was a small portable one we kept in the car. Our driveway is very long. I’m a little worried about our car getting trapped — not now, but next month. I’m too injured to shovel, and I don’t believe my wife when she says she’ll be able to shovel the whole way herself.

Right now, my wife is stood on a chair rolling out crust for a pie, pushing her entire body weight down toward the counter. The rolling pin squeaks exactly like our cat, Maya, who is asleep atop her tree across the room. I try to tell my wife this, and she doesn’t respond. I’m not sure if she heard me, since she’s wearing headphones, so I say it again. “Can’t talk… too much effort…” she grunts. She gets off the chair and starts rolling again.

We have a concrete section behind our house; we call it a “patio,” but I’m not sure if it really counts as one. It’s just a bunch of concrete. There’s also a path that leads along the side of the garage toward the back gate. Next to the back gate, we have a little shed, probably built by the home’s first owners. It has a window that you can prop open, and above the door there’s a wooden grate that you can open and close, whose purpose I can't exactly discern, but I have a feeling has something to do with birds.

Where the vegetable beds are, behind the garage, is covered in gravel. There are a few tree stumps, and a lot of little elm shrubs growing from the seeds that fall from our neighbour's backyard. In the far corner, there are two small trees, one of which bloomed purple in the spring. Beside those trees is a big pile of wood: mostly 2x6s, for some reason. There are a couple cinder blocks too, and two bricks.

The rest of the lawn, on other side of the path, is all grass, except for a small flowerbed opposite the garage. We’re going to try to incorporate some clover next year, because grass is boring, drinks too much water, and doesn’t support the bees. We planted some wildflowers this year, but I didn’t see many bees. I guess they just haven’t found our place yet.

When the patio furniture was out, I used to take a chair and sit right in the middle of the lawn. I would attach a lead to the leg, and let my cat, Mars, roam around a bit. He chases butterflies and other bugs, and rolls around on top of anthills. Then, he tangles his lead around the beds, or around a rock, or around the compost roller, or around the chair I’m sitting on, and whines until I untangle him. If I let him roam a little closer to the house, it takes him about thirty seconds to get tangled around all the other furniture.

For a while, I was letting him roam without a leash, but he discovered at some point that he could jump the fence. He’s a rescue, and technically I signed a contract saying I wouldn’t let him be an outdoor cat. I don’t think he’s ever lived outside for long, because when we got him, he was about ten months old, and had been with a foster home for a while. He’s obsessed with the outdoors, always staring out the window, and occasionally letting out a plaintive whine. If we open the front door, he bolts, but only across the driveway to eat his favourite blade of grass, where we can easily pick him up and throw him back inside. Our other cat doesn’t seem to care about the outdoors at all. When she lies down, she’s always facing inside, or cuddled up in our laps. She’s a bit older; maybe she used to live out there and is bored of it.

We live in an older suburb. We’re about five minutes from downtown, but at the same time, we’re on the outskirts of the city. That’s just how it is around here. All the newer suburbs are spreading out along the city’s borders, disconnected from anything. Large houses tightly packed with no backyards, thrown together out of cheap materials. We knew as soon as we got to this city that we didn’t want to end up in one of those. Our house was a deal; it’s about seventy years old, and we’re on the wrong side of the river. But it’s the quietest place I’ve ever lived, and you rarely see anyone anywhere.

Summer Saskatoon is gone, and we’re waiting for Winter Saskatoon to show up. As soon as we get that first real snowfall, the city will be transformed until late March. It’s almost unrecognizable. Yesterday we drove by a golf course where we had cross-country skied last winter, and it felt like a different world.

It’s weird to live where we are. It’s weird to live anywhere. I grew up next to the ocean, and now I’m about as far from one as I can get. Snow used to be a wondrous thing, and now it’s part of everyday life. I suppose it’s still a wondrous thing; it’s just one of those everyday wondrous things.

No one tells you until you’re already here, but Saskatchewan is a great place. I don’t know how to tell you how great a place it is, because when I try to describe it, it sounds like nothing at all. Perhaps it’s a lot like any other place.

I’ve lived in three places. I’ve lived here, I’ve lived in and around Vancouver, and I’ve lived in Mito, Japan. In many ways, they all feel like basically the same place. I suppose I’m not someone who pays too much attention to places. When I travel, I try to carve out a little corner I can call my own, and settle in. The exotic aspects don’t excite me as much as the little mundane experiences, as I try to imagine how the people who live there carve out their own little corners, and settle in. Grocery stores, train stations, bus stops, bridges and overpasses, sidewalks. I walk along them and imagine walking along them every day. I construct routines; I think that if I lived on this street, I might try to walk around the shrine on weekends. I might wait at this bus stop in the morning, or buy coffee from this cafe. Of course, at home, in my own routine, I don’t do any of those things. I scrape the ice off the car, let it warm up, climb in and drive to a construction site. On weekends, I stay inside, reading a book or typing on my computer.

But it doesn’t really matter what I do or don’t do. Imagining is fun in its own right. Reading this, you can imagine what it’s like to live in my house, to walk around my backyard, and to drive the snowy streets of Saskatoon. Is it as fascinating to you as your life is to me?