The wall

September 17, 2024

This afternoon before supper I practiced my tennis game, banging a pale green Wilson us open ball into the brick wall that spreads across from our house. As I banged the ball, the evening sun poured onto me from between the bars of the gate, painted Cadbury-purple, that bars entry to the west part of the factory. We bought this house in 2007, so we’ve lived across from the wall for 17 years. I grew up on a farm; we had a lot of cool stuff like hills to sled down and apple trees to climb, a river to swim in and fields in which to cross-country ski, and what seemed like a limitless supply of fresh vegetables, but we did not have any brick walls.

Is a brick wall an asset? I am not sure I would phrase it that way, but the red brick wall – four stories high, as long as a city block, and about a century old — and the Cadbury chocolate factory it encloses, are, if not friends, at least aspects of existence.

We have a love-hate, mostly hate, relationship with the factory; on Sunday morning they backed up a tanker truck to the wall and hooked up a hose to a proboscis that juts from the factory, and at intervals this truck emitted a whooshing sound that sounded like the air brakes on a freight train.

That said, tonight as I banged the green tennis ball into the wall, I saw the wall as an asset; I’m not a good tennis player and at any rate don’t know anyone with whom to play tennis, but I do have a wall, and it’s not going anywhere, and it’s a reliable partner that always returns the ball to me. Plus tonight a buttery, syrupy, sweet and a little bit chocolate smell wafted from the factory, so all in all the wall was not a bad place to be.

Our daughter was already a bit older when we moved here; our son was five. He really grew up by the wall, and played soccer and hockey against the wall, on the apron of cracked asphalt, out of the road, where the trucks park and where, when there are no trucks there, children can play. Plus friends and family have parked overnight by the wall for many years, with only the occasional stern note from Cadbury under a windshield wiper.

We plan to move to our farm in eastern Ontario to retire. I wonder whether I will miss the wall. I may have to find a tennis court, and someone with whom to play tennis. As for my ambivalent relationship with the factory, a source of noise and nice smells, I suppose that in life one always finds things to love and to curse. If Cadbury did not exist we would probably be forced to invent it, to find something against which to rage.