Home Again, and Again?

With the amount of time I spend away from home each year it stands to reason that I often wonder about the nature of home. I have come to appreciate that home is a combination of physical and emotional qualities, home is a place, but it is also an idea and both qualities have an added measure of being dynamic and ever changing. In the past few years home has been a number of seemingly contradictory experiences from the driver’s seat of an old Subaru to a third floor bachelor suite in Brown’s Addition where I lived for four months one summer.

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of airplanes, rental cars and taxicabs, from Vermont to Vancouver, Chicago to Toronto, Millbrook, Trenton, Belleville, Ancaster and back to Vancouver I have logged a ridiculous number of kilometres. But all this time in airplanes and behind the wheel provided a heap of opportunity to consider the nature of going home.

The road home is not always an easy trip it is bound by memory, expectation and some times nausea inducing drama. My grandparent’s house in Eastern Ontario is as much home to me as any other place I have lived, but Eastern Ontario is not. When I was at school in that area five years ago it was the people I shared that experience with made it home. But just as time has no meaning for some friendships, it is an enemy to others and though you may try to make that trip home you may not be welcome.

Going to my grandparent’s house is among the easiest things in the world for me to do. The only expectations they seem to have for me is that I make my own coffee and spend as much time as possible entertaining them with stories of my daring-do, as long as it doesn’t interrupt Coronation Street. I am quite happy to oblige on both counts and it is amazing how making one’s own coffee can take 30 minutes while the sounds of Coronation Street fill the living room.