The Last Summer of the Bed and Breakfast

On August 16th, Graeme's  House - at 22 years, one of the oldest inns in Kitsilano, closed - probably forever.

For the past 4 summers I have cleaned the place. Four summers before that I was at a dark and scary crossroads: mother dead, career flagging, love lost. I did the 21st century rounds of seers and sages. If one of them had predicted that in the very near future I would cross an ocean, land in one of the world’s loveliest settings for a city and be cleaning toilets every morning of every summer for four summers, I would have asked for my future back.

When Graeme (and yes she’s a woman - it’s a Scottish thing apparently)approached me with this proposition, she described it as ‘doing a Monica Dickens’. Graeme’s generation is probably the last to know what that is. Monica Dickens was a granddaughter of Charles; she took on humble jobs like cleaning to gather copy and write a lot of novels.

I did not want to write a novel about cleaning or cleaners. I did not want to write a novel about Bed and Breakfasts. I did need some quick extra money though, and one morning in early May found me following Graeme obediently through each of the four rooms learning how to make a bed with hospital corners - tuck in the bottom of the sheet, pull up a lower corner until it is the shape of a bishop’s mitre, tuck that in. The bed will look a lot like a neatly wrapped package. The guest, one must assume, will be overcome with an urge to become the contents.

The falling blossoms of an apple tree out on the deck signalled the beginning of my work each year. The proliferation of berries on the mountain ash in the back yard heralded the end. Sometime in September, I would look out of the window in the Rosedale Room and see that a scarlet breath of autumn had blown through the maple on 11th Avenue. By then there would be two or three guests in the house as opposed to the eight or nine that would squeeze around the kitchen table of an August weekend. 

The guests came from  all over the globe from Australia to  Finland, Switzerland to Taiwan. They would stumble in jet-lagged from a flight from Heathrow, alight from a taxi after an Alaskan cruise or drive up Waterloo Street straight from the Rockies in their camping car. They were physicists, orthopedic surgeons, psychics,  ecologists, neurologists, peripatetic grandparents, poets, lobbyists, toddlers, teenagers and new-born babies. They were very  rarely Republican. We did have two con men (not together) and one drunk but in a 22 year stint, they are barely worth a mention.

They were all invariably delighted with their stay. Other B&Bs may have been bigger, or have offered sherry at twilight or eggs Benedict for breakfast but very few had Graeme's gift for making people just plain happy to be in her home.

"We are all in this dance together," Graeme would say as she got up at 5am to serve breakfast to some early ferry passengers or allowed a trio of twenty something Finnish mountain bikers to take over the kitchen  and  fill the genteel Cornflower Room with a mountain of clothes and, what looked like armour, for their week long stay. 

"This is my life's work", remarked this former art teacher, English teacher, practicing therapist and interior designer one morning.  I paused, dustbuster in hand, ready to argue that she was far too clever, too qualified to be baking muffins and making beds. But I had failed to understand what Graeme had understood: that true hospitality - giving shelter, a room at an inn is one of the most  viscerally important and loving roles on the planet.

Graeme also gave shelter to the venerable Puhd - the black cat who wandered into her house during a blizzard and stayed to meet and greet and occasionally sleep with the guests for 21 years.  Puhd left us 3 years ago and can never be replaced  but in lush, verdant Vancouver where coyotes roam the lanes and bald eagles can sometimes be glimpsed in the sky over Graeme's house, the wild life endures.  Hummingbirds will continue to whirr round the petunias on the deck. Our neighbourhood raccoon will pursue his ambition to steal the back doormat.

But when the last of the guests wheeled their suitcase under the floral arch and down the garden path one Saturday morning last August something was lost forever in this lovely little Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano.

 In this perenially perky North American culture, there is not much room for sadness, there is little room for the sense of endings. If something ends, we must rush to see what is about to begin. If one door closes, then by golly, another one had better be opening before we've had time to catch our breath. We might nod in the direction of 'closure' but we don't really care for the bittersweet emotions of an end. Melancholy, that autumnal sense of the extraordinary sadness of our human condition - as soon as we live and love something, anything, it is already slipping away from us - rarely makes an appearance on Oprah.

Well, this summer, something quite lovely ended on Waterloo St. I never thought, when I was grumbling my way through the bathrooms, dustbuster and toilet brush in hand, that I would miss these mundane tasks but they proved, like the B&B and like Graeme herself, to be rather good for the soul. So, time to mark  a moment of sadness and say goodbye to the hospital corners, the colour co-ordinated towels, the cheese muffins and the blueberry scones, to the endless slivers of left-over soap and the bottomless pot of coffee; to Puhd and the racoon and to all those strangers who came up the steps to sleep and snore and dream for just a few short hours before going on their way. Now Graeme goes on her's - off to some other adventure I am sure.  But her lovely house will be much missed.  Farewell Graeme's House - it was a privilege and a joy to know you.