“I didn’t know you were so sentimental,” a friend said after I showed her my new ring and explained the story.

“I’m not,” anxious not to blow my cover as the stoic one. “This is less about preserving the past as it is about taking jewelry that despite having meaning I would otherwise never wear and turning it into something that represents this next stage in my life.”

Even my rings are lane-changers!

Sometimes the cupboard is near-bare and even I am stumped about what I might eat. The strip of takeout joints, just two blocks away, is like a siren call to my hungry ears. But one day recently, I created food from nearly-no food. Here’s how.

Veronika Tursik lives in a very small hamlet outside Stratford, Ontario. It’s the land of the vehicle so being a non-driver there and working a 35 minute drive away meant that Veronika relied on her husband to ferry her back and forth. And that was fine! Until nearly two years ago, when it most definitely wasn’t.

From the time Veronika was 17 and for the 23 years that followed, she and her now-ex had a good marriage. They had two kids; they owned a farm where they grew sweet corn and sold it every August from the stand at the end of their lane; they had close connections with his family, who all live nearby, and her family back in Toronto where she grew up; and they enjoyed spending time together. Veronika remembers strolling through a Stratford mall in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2023, holding hands, and thinking “wow, I can’t believe we’re still feeling this affection after all these years!”

For 30 years, the community housing sector has been parked on the shoulder of the development highway as the private sector hurtled past. “We’ll leave it to the market,” governments said in the early 1990s, when they stopped funding programs. The market did a fine job of giving us skyscraper condos and sprawling McMansion suburban communities. The lack of affordable, secure housing in Canada, however, has reached crisis proportions.

This week, I celebrated with 1000 other community housing people at the annual conference hosted by the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association — ONPHA for short. Celebrated what you ask? Have we solved the crisis? Well, no, but it was a celebration of the beginning of merging back into that developer traffic — a collective lane-change, you might say. We’re going to build again!

Funny that the thing I eat every morning, and that often appears at other meals too, just for its sheer versatility, hasn’t yet appeared in this column. Yes, I’m talking about the humble egg. Damn, I love them!

By 90, most people have been in a few lanes. Christine Mounsteven is no different: immigrant from Scotland at 12; bride at 20; staffer at Imperial Oil; mother; shopgirl at Simpsons The Room; singleton in her 50s; seniors’ advocate; housing co-op member; CHFT lifetime director; and so on. In this profile, however, I want to hone in on two difficult lanes Christine navigated which helped make her the force she is.

Weston, where I live, is lucky to have lane-changer, Safiya Randera, in its midst. Safiya is the driving force behind things like the Creative Commons Collective Artist Supper Club and the green sanctuary nestled between a high-rise and a parking lot. But she wouldn’t be in this series if she hadn’t had some significant shifts to get here.

IDenese Gascho met her ex in Jamaica, where she was born “under the clock,” the Jamaican expression for a city girl. That ex is a Mennonite from a small town in southwestern Ontario, and about as far from “under the clock” as you can get.  At a co-op housing function early in the summer, Denese gave me a hint of her story of moving with him to his hometown. I had to know more! I can’t wait to tell you too. 

In her LinkedIn profile, Cathy Mann describes herself as a “No-nonsense fundraising expert.” It’s that approach that drew me to her when she did some consulting for a charity board I was on a decade+ ago. I’ve followed her since on social media so hers was the website I gravitated to when I sought out some fundraising advice in my current position. When I heard this long-time Toronto resident had relocated to Nova Scotia though, my lane-changing bells dinged loudly. Hers is the classic pandemic move story except wait a second — she’s not a millennial escaping Toronto to get into the real estate market. And nor does she identify as a digital nomad. Nope, she’s in her early 60s still serving the charitable sector where she’s been for more than 30 years. Let’s hear why Wolfville, Nova Scotia has all Cathy needs, after a lifetime in big cities.