1800s to present

Berry, Berenice, their daughters and now James (for reasons they hadn't gone into because it was nice to have help with the girls and, anyway, Berenice found him good company and an easy house guest) lived in a relatively small house on the west side of the Don Valley River.

Spruce Street, on which their house sits, is neither grand nor seedy. It's the seam of one of Toronto's infamous "pockets" -- the kind of street where on the north side might stand a stately line of tall Victorians, still showing off their original Toronto-fired brick, BMWs tucked safely away in back carports. In contrast, the south side is squatted by short little homes covered in painted aluminum, flat and charmless, rusted children's toys and old cat litter bags blown into corners of unkempt lawns.

In this neighbourhood, just a block or so further up, you'll find looming three-story mansions with front gardens, beautiful parkland, a Starbucks and nice brunch restaurants. One block further down: the Regent Park projects, a homeless shelter, and a cockroach-ridden donut shop that inexplicably specializes in Beef Patties, where old men smoke cigarettes down to the filter and read yesterday's papers.

It would be hard to say whether Toronto is a city with pockets of poor within the rich, or pockets of rich within the poor. It hardly matters. The point is that the fabric of Toronto feels nubby and uneven because it's a city that paints over its history; that tears down what is old rather than restore it; that reinvents itself rather than remembering. The city went construction crazy in the 1970s (alas, a most unfortunate time for architectural style) and, in this fervour to embrace modernity, demolished many of its old treasures.

From a Euro-Afro-Asian perspective, the loss couldn't be considered all that big. After all, Toronto is comparatively young -- less than 200 years of establishment. But when you dig down into its earth, you find the uneven layers of cultures and times, each sitting atop the other like sediment at the bottom of the lake.

The bit of Toronto where the Rosses live is called Cabbagetown. Originally, like any part of Toronto, these were the ancestral lands of First Nations people: Mississaugas of the Anishinaabe, the Haundenosaunee Confederacy and the Wendat. While this layer of the city's history is almost entirely obscured from modern view, it is the bedding of everything that it is built above it.

The Europeans arrived in the 1700s, laying down the next layer of silt. By 1790, the city had been drawn, mapped and quartered; lands were merrily handed out to wealthy men and their children who built log houses, then factories, upgrading as their fortunes rose like in a game of Monopoly.

By the mid-1800s, they had erected neighbourhoods with functional, smaller houses for their workers: in large part, these were Irish potato-famine refugees who'd come in search of jobs and food and generally found enough of both to stay. It's these workers' homes, and the cabbage patches they grew in their front yards, that earned Cabbagetown its name.

All this to say, the Ross home on Spruce Street was one of many tidy but smallish formerly working-class homes in this neighbourhood. Cabbage patches long since traded in for rosebushes and iron gates; frontages painted in muted grays and blues or sandblasted to reveal their original brickwork; they weren't beautiful, but they were undoubtedly old. As old as any building you'll find in the city.

But to give you an idea of how rich even a short history can be, here's a quick review:

1885 : The first inhabitants move into the new house on Spruce Street. The O'Donnells are a family of 7. They are delighted with the many small rooms (easier to heat in the harsh Toronto winter) and by the dirt-floored cellar in which they can store their garden-grown cabbages. Mr. O'Donnell works at the cork mill and has a vicious temper when he's been "in his cups." He's a bit of cliche, unfortunately. Mrs. O'Donnell hangs hand-embroidered floral curtains, sweeps the porch daily and tries, in some years unsuccessfully, to make sure her children are fed adequately. In one terrible summer, she and the two youngest children die of measles in the back bedroom.

1914 - 1932 : The house is cared for by a Mrs. Abernall (there is no Mr. Abernall on record) who has turned it into an informal guest house, letting rooms by the week to the city's great many travellers and itinerant soldiers. It's by no means a large house, but she's able to turn some profit from the bedrooms and by serving breakfast to those who want it at an additional price of 50 cents per day. Domestic help is limited to a single maid, usually a young niece or cousin of the Abernalls. In 1924, the maid of the time miscarries an extremely premature infant down in the rough quarters of the cellar. She has told no one of her condition, of course, and feels that the tiny, dead thing she labours over in teeth-gritting silence on the dirt floor is her reward for leading a (mostly) virtuous life. Mrs. Abernall helps her bury the lost child in a tea towel behind the outdoor toilet.

1930s : The Great Depression descends on the city and sits on this neighbourhood with a particular weight. The house stands empty for a time, the only tenants being hardy rats and the raccoons who noisily make their home inside the back wall of what is now the doorway to the kitchen. Eventually, the city reclaims the derelict structure, evicts the raccoons, minimally restructures it and places a poor family inside it for emergency shelter.

1940s : Inhabitants turn over several times as needy families are placed and replaced. The house and its rotating occupants endure a perpetual infestation of bedbugs, a city-wide problem that is eventually handled by the liberal application of now-illegal DDT.

1950s : The house is scrubbed, polished, refurbished and graced with indoor toilets. The new owner, Mr. Carmichael, has bought up several slightly squalid properties in the east end for a song. He plans to retrofit them all, split them up into rental units and become a rich landlord. He is successful in his plan and the house rents as a sort of duplex for nearly two decades. Sometimes families, sometimes single men, each with their own floor of the house. The house now has two kitchens, two bathrooms, and each level has a living room and a single bedroom.

1970s : The house is converted into a single-family dwelling again. The second kitchen is removed, and the second floor is reclaimed for bedrooms. The second bathroom stays. The family who owns it now is called the Hughes. Nothing terrible happens during their residency here. Apart from the death of a beloved family dog, which they bury in a shallow grave under a rose bush, their years leave no real scar on the dwelling. The children are happy in this house but eventually leave it, as children do. The parents, Maisy and Donald Hughes, stay on in the house until they realize there's no reason they can't spend their retirement years in the warmer climes of Florida. And so, they put the house on the market and are thrilled to sell over-asking to the Rosses in the early 2000s.

When Berry and Berenice move in, they strip inch deep wallpaper and paint from every surface of the house and make it their own.

Apart from the maid's baby and the family dog going into the ground, the backyard has remained relatively undisturbed all these years. The layers of sediment around the foundation of the home had never been turned over.

As they are now finding out, like the layers of the city itself, the deeper one digs, the richer the story becomes.

***

Papa and his crew of archeologists were out there, digging and sifting, generally turning Berenice's planned private oasis into an inhospitable moonscape. Dig, sift, pile. There were holes deeper than the men standing in them and string guidelines crisscrossing the entire area, the better to keep track of where they had yet to dig.

Jim and Berenice liked to stand at the kitchen window and watch as Papa's crew carefully brushed, tagged and wrapped his finds. He had started, of course, with the spot of the original bone, and it seemed to have produced a generous number of bits and pieces. After wrapping, a member of his crew would take the thing and place it reverently into a crate which sat safely at the very back of the yard, (right where the outdoor toilet once stood - but they aren't to know that) along with the crew's lunch boxes and discarded jackets.

The whole routine was marvellous to watch. It was performed like a silent ballet (dig, sift, brush, tag, wrap), in almost total quiet, so concentrated and intent were Papa's crew.

As Berenice stood mesmerized by the choreography, her eye caught movement at the back fence. Several raccoons, the biggest being larger than the neighbour's dog, sat similarly mesmerized. Only it wasn't the crew they were eyeing -- it was their lunch.

As if acting on a signal from their leader, the whole group of them scrabbled down the fence and descended giddily on the lunch bags, tearing into them with expert paws, liberating food from containers and scattering drink bottles with abandon.

At this, Papa broke his silence and started swearing like a fiend. Not so much because of the lunch, but because the raccoons were dangerously close to the artifact box.

"Devils!" he swore at them in Greek, waving his short arms and stomping toward them.

The raccoons — unaccustomed to being challenged so directly, and extremely reluctant to walk away from the pile of booty they'd laid claim to — sized Papa up. The largest one leapt into the artifact container itself, and without breaking eye contact with the shouting, sweaty Greek man, steadily shoved the last of a peanut butter sandwich into its face.

"Get away! Away!" Papa bellowed uselessly at the thieving creatures just as Berenice appeared with a broom to shoo them off.

"Argh!" Papa cried, clutching his chest like a man who'd just been stabbed in the heart.

"I'm sorry, Papa," offered Berenice, employing the traditional, pointless Canadian apology for something she had absolutely no hand in.

"Meh," muttered Papa as he recovered himself. "What you going to do? Is Tronno after all."

He trudged back over to his hole and got back to work.