The Gingerbread Manifesto

Chapter 1.1 - Dappled Vine Estates

Inventas vitam juvat excoluisse per artes

“And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery”

- Vergilius Aeneid

OTTAWA SOUTH, December 10, 2006 – Tom McAuley, vice-president of the Dappled Vine Estates Committee, seconded the motion to accept the Estates’ proposed slogan of “Your perfectly planned community”. After all, he never did anything in half measures, and had spent the last eleven months making sure every important detail had been hammered in place. The street layout was precisely calculated to minimize traffic thoroughfares and direct routes through the community, increasing the number of ‘esteemed’ properties on cul-de-sacs, rambling ways, and out-of-the-way crescents, allowing children to set up their road hockey nets in safety.

The Estates’ location was chosen, of course, with the utmost care; no site more idyllic could have been found in the whole of the Ottawa Valley. Greenfinch Lake had been the home of summer cottage-goers for decades. Clear waters sparkling in the sunlight, its banks fringed in cattails, leading up to a gorgeous rolling meadow of grasses and flowers with ticklish names like hairy beardtongue, velvetleaf, amethyst aster, and slender blue-eyed grass. Every Ottawan has memories of the place, canoeing the waters, jumping off the rickety old dock into the cool waters, alarming the ducks and the local muskrat named By-Bee. In fact, nineteen generations of muskrats had all been named By-Bee, though nobody ever seemed to notice that no one muskrat ever lived more than four or five years, or that six different By-Bees all lived under the dock last year. Care had been taken to ensure the houses’ foundations were on solid ground, to avoid the sinking homes and cracked foundations which plagued a couple of the East-end communities. 

Dappled Vine Estate’s houses were, as can be expected, their pride and joy. The leading residential architecture firm in North America had been specially sought out, and the Tallahassee-based Richardson & Oakley Architects Inc. had produced some of the most glorious home designs to ever be built on this continent, with the exotic tang of Florida every Ottawa resident dreams of in the long winters. 

All other details had been considered and mapped out, from the colour and font of the street signs to the hybrid variety of weed/pest/drought/pet/child-resistant grass (Kanada Lush #5) to be planted on every one of the perfect lawns. The street names, consisting of tantalizing wines and classy cheeses, were chosen to emanate that je-ne-sais-quoi of good breeding that is to be expected of a community of this calibre. Ottawa’s most upstanding citizens will flock to this place, and with the approved plan for the Dappled Vine Estates Community Association, residents will form their community, participate in joint decisions, and form the glue that bonds their people into the tightly-knit communities that are the foundations of every desired, and thus profitable, community in the city. 

Everything was going to plan. Tom McAuley had broken both ground and sweat with a single shovelful and a kilowatt smile. Construction crews with the big pipes and toys sketched in the roads with gravel. Yellow fire hydrants with perfect blue caps stood guard over the area; sewer, electrical, cable, and gas lines were all in. The first few showhomes were nearly done and staged, complete with a row of proud Lombardy Homes flags snapping and clanking in the frozen wind.

Come spring, the whole community was scheduled to dazzle its way into its enchanted existence, and prove to the world that Lombardy Homes is synonymous with world-class development. Nothing could possibly go wrong that hadn't already been accounted for in the voluminous risk assessment documentation for the development.