Excerpt: Walking with Beth: Conversations with My Hundred-Year-Old Friend by Merilyn Simonds

Excerpted from Walking with Beth: Conversations with my Hundred-Year-Old Friend by Merilyn Simonds. Copyright © 2025 Merilyn Simonds. Published by Random House Canada.Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

The Frame in Which We Live

I walk with Beth along the same route she takes every day. The properties we pass are large, although the houses are modest, built around the time I was born, when few families were financially secure and everyone was expected to plant a victory garden. 

Two soaring maple trees hold the lawn in front of Beth’s house, a 1970s split-level bungalow built in what was once the backyard of the house next door. “Those trees are a gift,” Beth says. Her writing room looks into their canopy, a hieroglyph of branches against the winter sky, a lush landscape of leaves in summer. One of the trees is wrapped with a wide green ribbon, a vestige of Beth’s hundredth birthday last summer, when she refused a party but a troupe of Irish dancers surprised her with a set dance on the grass.

I have known Beth in only two places: this bungalow and her nineteenth-century red-brick row house in Portsmouth Village, with the Zen garden out back, its stone sculptures set on raked gravel, a house where years ago Beth and I drank tea and she told me she was learning Celtic dancing.

Beth was ninety-three when she moved from the little red-brick house to the beige split-level she chose because it had a downstairs apartment that would accommodate visits from her children. Must we always be a parent? I remember thinking back then, regretting all that she was leaving—the beauty, the exquisite solitude, the convenience of the village—for a move to a suburb. But visiting her now, I see the benefits. No stairs. A garage. A sunny back yard. Mature, arching trees. 

The house where I live is in a condo village by the Cataraqui River where it joins Lake Ontario. It is a tall, narrow townhouse with seven levels and forty-nine steps. The spaces are modern, interconnected, filled with light. The house I left for this one was solid in a way that only a two-hundred-year-old stone structure can be. The house before that was built in 1880; we sanded the floors to their original sheen, reglazed the windows, restored the horsehair plaster ceilings and walls. When we peeled off the wallpaper, dozens of layers, we found a poem scratched into the plaster.

I considered myself a settled person until a magazine asked me to write an article on “home,” and I realized I’d lived in twenty-six places over my lifetime. The house where I was born in Winnipeg, the rental our family moved into while my parents built the house that seemed most like home to me. Two houses in Brazil, various apartments in my early adulthood, the shack my first husband and I moved into in northern Ontario, abandoning it finally for a pre-fab R2000 house we won in a silent auction, then the house in Kingston where I found the letters that became The Convict Lover. 

Just before my sixtieth birthday, my youngest sister and I returned to Brazil. We hadn’t been back since our family left in 1962. When the taxi pulled up to our hotel in Campinas, we were sobbing so hard we could hardly pay the driver. In front of us was the park where we’d spent hours playing; across the street was the building where we’d lived for two years, Edifício Itatiaia, designed, we discovered, by Oscar Niemeyer, the world-famous architect of Brasília. 

A week later, the hotel manager left a message for us to meet him in the lobby at three that afternoon. When we showed up, giddy with curiosity, he walked us across the park and up to apartment 801, our childhood home. The man who lived there was a psychologist (my sister is a clinical psychologist) and he was writing a book (I write books). This generous man sat in his living room while my sister and I wandered the rooms. We could have done it blind-folded, so little had changed, not even the view from the back balcony, where I once saw a woman fall to her death.

Seeing the apartment sent us on a mission to find our second home in Brazil, the house at 817 Rua Silva Téles. We walked up and down the street, recognizing nothing. Finally, we stopped in a little restaurant and the bartender told us the house had been torn down and was now a parking lot. We found the parking lot and spent the rest of the afternoon kicking away circles of gravel, revealing the wood parquet of the living room, the green tile of the bathroom, the white marble of the kitchen floor, the walls as visible to us as if they were still standing. We turned our backs to the parquet, the tile and marble, and looked out to the rise of houses that used to be an arroyo flanked by favelas, and beyond that, to the wild hill where I once met an untethered palomino pony that followed me home. 

“My parents always chose houses that had one foot in the country, one in the city,” Beth tells me over tea after our walk. “Minnows in one direction, sidewalks in the other. One of our houses was called La Ferme.” 

She reads me another quote from May Sarton that she copied into her notebook. “There must be many women who have not demanded ‘a room of their own,’ who have not realized how closely bound up one’s identity can be with the frame in which one lives.” 

“I never had a room of my own,” Beth says. “But I always had a corner, a place that was mine.” Now, for thirty years, she’s had an entire house to frame her solitary self. 

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Beth and I couldn’t find a time to visit this week. I had a literary event on the other side of the province that ate up three days. When we meet again, I tell her that I passed the hours of the long drive home thinking about houses, all the shapes they take through a life, pondering how to choose the right frame for these final decades. We are sitting on her back deck, which is high enough to see over the fence into the backyard next door. Her neighbours are whimsical gardeners: the yard is punctuated by soaring trees wound with paths that delineate not only beds of ferns and flowers but collections of pottery, glass, and garden gnomes. Beth looks up at the canopy of pine, maple, and mountain ash.

“I am thinking perhaps I might almost be ready for a retirement residence,” she muses. “But how can I leave these trees?”