Where is home?
I’m not always sure where I belong. The obvious answer is the farm in northern BC where I live with Lone Wolf. I’m happy here. I feel peaceful, comfortable, nourished, body and soul. But when I visit Vancouver Island, where I was born, where I lived for 47 years, where my family lives, I feel a tug. A voice just behind my left ear clamours, “This is home.”
I hardly recognize the place. The landscape changes from one visit to the next. The cities and the island highway are noisy, crowded, hectic, hot. But just a few steps away it’s blue as big as the ocean, it’s verdant, it’s textured, it’s a tapestry. It’s home.
Or is it?
I go back and forth. And happily, I can go back and forth. Two or three times a year, I feed my spirit with things the north can’t offer no matter how much I love it: the company of my family, Les Misérables at Chemainus Theatre, fine Italian food at Cuckoo in Coombs, islands floating in the Georgia Strait, lush gardens, copper arbutus bark, a certain blue and white house on the corner of Southgate and Adelaide streets, fresh Italian plums plucked from a tree in a friend’s backyard. Not just any friend—the one who’s known me for 53 years, who remembers being wide-eyed kids with me, who stayed in our hometown and made a life there. A good life. A peaceful life. A life not so terribly different from mine in some ways. A life I could have chosen.
But I didn’t.
I don’t.
I choose this.
This is the place where I stand every day and give thanks: for my beautiful life, for my family, my friends, my dog, my garden, my work, my home.
My homes.
4 Responses to “Where is home?”
Yes. Home is where the heart is. Sometimes the heart is definitely in more than just one place! <3
How lovely Leslie. Your words and images bring tears to my eyes.
You’re a mind reader, I swear you are. I was just thinking the other day how the place I grew up but left as a teenager is without question ‘home’… without question. And yet. (I love how you put it) Where I (also) stand each day and give thanks, is absolutely home… So, yes, where is home? Such a good question. Maybe the old cliché, ‘where the heart is’ has some merit. The heart, after all, is an expansive thing…
I am also in the grey zone constantly wondering where I belong and where is my home. I am right now living in my small acadian coastal town where I was born and grew up. I left it as a young adult to follow my friends who were running towards higher education and the dream of success in a bigger world. I navigated through the long and winding road of our vast country until my ship landed on the beach of Victoria BC in 1994. That is where I found my place and my friend Lone Wolf… I have never regretted that time in my life and am still today filled with nostalgia… I go back when I can and wished I could one day stay until the end… Thank you Leslie for this beautiful note!