The coddiwomple queen: Anita has walked along every street in Hamilton
Carrick Avenue has a new claim to fame.
You might be familiar with its original notoriety. That’s right, the street Evelyn Dick lived on — and if I have to explain who Evelyn Dick is, well, ask your parents.
Its new distinction is more honourable in character than being murderer’s row and maybe will be rehabilitative one day. But you won’t guess unless you know Anita Joldersma. It’s the last street she walked along to complete her unique and wonderful four-year project.
She has perambulated every single street in the city of Hamilton (pre-amalgamation). Every one. Your street. Mine. More than 2,400 miles in total, (but, Anita adds, that includes her walk to her mailbox).
Literally hundreds of streets. She lost count.
She didn’t know when she started that it’d take four years. And she didn’t know, when it turned out Carrick would be her last, that Evelyn Dick lived there.
But it’s fitting, one bit of history on top of another. And to plant the flag on top of the achievement, she walked it (by serendipity) in the company of thenwould-be-again-and-now-in-factMayor Fred Eisenberger.
She picked Carrick because her son had recently moved there. Fred was campaigning in the area and when Anita told him what she was doing he asked, “Can I come?” So they walked Carrick together.
“My cousin had some flowers for me at the end,” says Anita. “But (after four years) it was all a bit anticlimactic. Like Forrest Gump (at the end of his long run).” But still fantastic.
It started inauspiciously enough when she went for walk, September 2014. Nothing grandiose. She just wanted to get out.
“I walked around the block, Rymal from Upper Wentworth to Upper Sherman.
“I had a blister starting, I was thirsty and sweaty and had the wrong shoes on. It was just all wrong.”
Next day, fuelled by self-reproach, she got back on the horse, so to speak. She walked.
“I’m a bit OCD,” she says. “All my spices are organized alphabetically. So, on a map, I started marking in the streets I walked so I wouldn’t do them twice.
“But I still wasn’t enjoying. For three weeks I walked,” but with no real appetite for the enterprise.
“Then one day I was walking on Acadia” — she points out the street on her city map, which now has a black magic marker line along every single street — “and a woman, a stranger, drove out of her driveway and rolled down her window and yelled, ‘Keep going. Good luck. I’m a walker too.’”
Anita says, “I wanted to yell back, ‘But I’m not a walker. I hate it.’ The next morning I couldn’t remember the house. But I wanted to thank her.” The encouragement inspired her. And so, with fresh motivation, she learned to enjoy.
She walked down one street, then another, and in time the idea took shape. Tackle every street. And now she has.
“I had been walking for about two and a half years, when I happened to be on Acadia again and coming out of a house was the woman from the car.” Anita stopped her and asked if it had been she who rolled down the window to encourage her.
“‘I think that was me,’ she said,” Anita recalls. “We stood hugging and crying in her driveway.”
The whole wonderful exercise — she went through four pairs of shoes — has been strewn with moments of such powerful human
connection, Anita says.
And her vocabulary grew; she learned coddiwomple. To travel in a purposeful manner toward a vague destination.
“I feel now like I belong to the whole city and these are all my neighbourhoods.”
She’s discovered so much about her city that she didn’t know and has reconsidered so much that she thought she did.
One of the treats, she tells me, was finding a street with the name of each of her six children — Anne (though the street is spelled Ann), Shirley, Laura, Karen, Henry and Andrew.
She had great support, she says, from her church, friends, social media followers and family.
But ultimately, she did it herself. About 500 miles a year, she says.
Now Anita, who belongs to the Hamilton Mountain Writers’ Club (which she highly recommends), wants to write a book. What will she call it?
You have to know Anita to guess but if you do you probably will — she’s hilarious and had me in stitches through our whole interview.
Ready? Confessions of a Street Walker. Happy trails, Anita. May all your coddiwomples lead you straight to your dreams.