Going Home

My husband and I have just returned from a three-week vacation.  We “went home” to southern Ontario, where we spent our first eight years as newlyweds and a young family.  We wanted to see people and places that were once important to us.  We had a wonderful time – visiting with former students from Mount Allison University and old friends and family, going to museums and art galleries, attending three Canadian Football League games courtesy of our son (including the first ever home game of the Ottawa RedBlacks in their new stadium), shopping, and eating various ethnic foods that we just don’t have access to in our small town.  We were tired when we arrived home, but in a good way.

I really miss the variety of life in southern Ontario.  I love driving on back roads, and where we live now, we have a very limited number of back roads.  To drive to Moncton, we have basically two realistic routes.  It gets old pretty fast.  I love shopping (not necessarily buying, but browsing and looking), and Moncton is full of chain stores, but really has very little in the way of unique and different shops.  Halifax is a little better, but it still can’t beat the sheer number of quirky, funky, interesting, artsy, independent little shops and markets scattered throughout the towns of southern Ontario, and the dizzying variety of ethnic foods represented there.  Although I love the architecture of old Maritime homes and towns, the old homes and buildings of rural Ontario also speak to me. 

At one point, we discussed whether we could ever live in southern Ontario again.  We have been gone for over twenty years, and in that time, the places we once knew like the backs of our hands have changed considerably.  The little country road where we used to live is now advertising a subdivision, the closest major town to us has monster homes and townhouses and condominiums way out into what used to be countryside and farmland (I was completely disoriented even though we used to drive down those roads frequently), and even our favourite little conservation area, which used to be isolated and underused, has undergone improvements and beautification (and now charges $12 for day use!).  The major highways have been expanded, box stores have sprung up in places we wouldn’t have dreamed of putting box stores twenty years ago, and the population of the area has exploded. 

I was reminded of the saying that you can’t go home again once you’ve left.  Thomas Wolfe, an early twentieth century American writer, wrote a novel called You Can’t Go Home Again, and he wrote "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

In many ways, that is true.  Life moves on, people and places change, our dreams and goals undergo revisions and transformations, kids and families grow up.  But near the end of our trip, we stayed with a family that “adopted” us when we were young newlyweds far away from our own extended families.  They made us part of their extended family which included themselves, their children, and their children’s children.  We spent many Sunday afternoons at “The Farm”, became good friends with their daughters and their families in particular, helped out once or twice during maple syrup season, and spent a memorable Christmas Day with them when I was pregnant with our first child.  Although we haven’t lived near them in over twenty years, it was like no time had passed.  We immediately felt the way we used to when we drove up the lane – that we were “home.”  Yes, a lot has changed at The Farm.  They have retired from raising cattle, the trees in their front field which were mere babies when we left are now almost forest-sized, and their grandchildren have children of their own.  But the love and friendship which was so much a part of our lives back then is still there.  That is what makes a “home”, and it is what makes it possible to keep going back home, even if we never actually live there again. 

We have a lot to be grateful for, friends who are our family, warm welcomes and emotional farewells, and the promise of “next time.”  At the end of our vacation, we were glad to be home again, but I left a little bit of myself “back home” in Ontario too.  Till next time.