The Arkansas Traveler: Westmount

It's the time of year that Edmontonians love the most -- high summer! (And perhaps the only time of year that it's possible to love Edmonton.) The temperature is a perfect 75 degrees. The sun stays up until 10:00 p.m. And every flower in every garden is in full bloom: roses, daisies, petunias, peonies, delphiniums ... I try to take as much advantage of the good weather and the blooming flowers flowers as I can, so every evening after dinner I tie Colin to my chest and take Remy by the lead, and we go walking for an hour or two to enjoy the beauty of Nature and of the City.

If you had asked me this time last year what I thought of Edmonton, I would not have said anything remotely positive. In fact, I said some pretty nasty things (not that anyone was asking). Although I stand by my general critique of the city (that it is sprawling, has no trees or street life, and its houses are all ugly and overpriced), I am a little embarrassed by such an attitude now, because, in fact, there are few places in the city that are lovely, and I'm now lucky enough to live in one of them.

Westmount, as my neighborhood is known, is a little neighborhood of just six square blocks, with old houses, tree-lined streets, three playgrounds, an elementary school, and lots of lovely neighbors. That may not sounds like much, but it Edmonton it's pretty rare. Unlike the new subdivisions, where most Edmontonians live, Westmount has on-street parking, so the houses look like houses, instead of enormous garages with some living space tacked on as an afterthought. And unlike the new subdivisions, Westmount has sidewalks, so there's actually a lot of foot traffic. We know most of our neighbors because we meet them every evening when everyone goes out for a walk. And unlike anywhere else in town, Westmount also has trees -- old, leafy, hardwood trees -- perhaps the most sought-after feature in a prairie city with sunny, cloudless skies.

But my favorite thing about Westmount is the old architecture: noble, two-story Victorians with open-air porches and real glass windows. (That may sound like a strange detail to fixate on, but most houses in Edmonton have plexi-glass windows, which make them look like cheap plastic dollhouses.) In particular, there are two streets, 125th and 126th streets, that are zoned the "Westmount Historical District," and if I squint really hard, I can almost imagine I'm back home in Little Rock's Quapaw Quarter.

Alas, we do not live on either of these streets. We rent a few blocks over in a tiny little flat-faced house that was probably built in 1948. In fact, most of the houses in Westmount look like ours, and on our street there are no less than a dozen such houses with the exact same exterior and floorplan. In earlier times, I would have turned up my nose at such architectural monotony, and I would have thought houses like ours cramped and dismal. In fact, the rooms are a little cramped, each about four feet shorter on either side than they should be, but that is neither here nor there.

Had I been offered a house to rent in our neighborhood on first moving to Edmonton from Germany, I'm sure I would have echoed the horror uttered by of some of my favorite authors upon seeing North America after long sojourns in Europe: "Oh, the wild disheveled, backwoods look of everything when one firsts comes home" (Edith Wharton), "What monstrous ugliness!" (Henry James), "The Americans have an unequalled genius for making everything hideous!" (Vita Sackville-West). But I suppose it's a testament to just how beat-down I was last year, that I now look at my tiny, flat-face little house, and all the other, identical flat-faced little houses in my neighborhood, and I feel that I have died and gone to heaven. I mean, it could just be so much worse...

The only bittersweet note in my otherwise unqualified rhapsodies about Westmount is the fact that Kevin and I could never afford to own a house here. Not even our tiny, flat-faced little house. Although very few people in Edmonton seem to share our preference for tiny old houses on leafy streets close to the city center, enough of them do that they have bid up the prices in our neighborhood to exorbitant rates. The houses on 125th and 126th Street sell for $600,000 to a cool million. Little houses like ours start at $400,000 -- that's $400 a square foot ... starting price -- and most of them need extensive renovations on top of that. We've run the numbers every which way, and under no circumstances--short of a windfall like Kevin winning a Nobel Prize or me writing a best-selling novel--could we make a mortgage on such a house and still be financially responsible. And after watching the heart-wrenching housing bust in the U.S., we are committed to only buying a house if it's truly financially responsible for us.

So, we've looked into other neighborhoods, "younger" neighborhoods with no trees and no sidewalks, neighborhoods where we don't want to live anyway, but even there the starting price on a three-bedroom house is $400,000. $400,000 just seems to be the magic number in Edmonton; and it just seems like an impossibly high number for a city where we don't really want to be living in the long-term. It's difficult, though, to pull back from a decision -- buying a home -- that everyone else at our stage of life seems to be making. Somehow they can make the numbers work, why can we?

But every time I start to feel sorry for myself, I just try to remember that we live in a beautiful little house, in the greatest neighborhood in Edmonton, and we pay half as much in rent as we would for a mortgage on it. What's so bad about that? And just to strengthen my resolve, I repeat a little mantra I learned from a friend of a friend, a very successful artist who could buy any house he wanted but instead chooses to rent: "Home ownership is a Western construct." Then I say it again for good measure, and I tie Colin to my chest, grab Remy's leash, and we head out the door.

Remy, Colin and me on the trail...

A "pretty-ish sort of little wilderness" near our house ...

Turrets and delphiniums on 126th street ...

A path "littered" with roses...

Red beebalm and blue delphiniums, a perfect combination...

A wildflower garden...

The branches of the birch-willow...

I had never seen a red house until I came to Edmonton, but there are quite a few of them here. I think it's because the red is such a cheerful soldier against the long, white winter...