Going home: part 2

Travelling back home, I realize the ride into a place gives you a sense of its character, its growth and its change. Even after being deemed a City in Bloom and advertising it, it seems that the garden centre that sat just off the highway has disappeared. Even thirty years of regular customers can’t stop progress when the city council decides a ring road is more important than a plant store. For me, it was a marker for a turn off down to Ellerslie Road that housed a school and rows of baseball diamonds. That is where I spent my teenage summers 2 times in the week and once on Sundays with families who treated beer and baseball as a religion.

The truck stop we used to go to for twenty four hour breakfasts is now gone and bulldozed flat and instead of space flanking our highways, the wide tracks of land just outside the city have been cemented over. Slowly our many malls are being replaced by consumer office parks that are filled with warehouse sized outlet stores you have to drive between. It’s actually parking lots as far as the eye can see.

After getting my fill of the new Starbucks and Kenny Rodgers Chicken chains, its home. My parent’s house. For the first day or so, it’s overwhelming. We plan BBQs and coffees and members of my family come over in flocks. They pick me apart for clues of my new existence – what’s England like, why do you talk funny, do you like it there. The most dreaded question I continually deflect is – when are you coming home? It’s the hardest one to find an answer to.

Coming home becomes a time only found in the small moments I can find between deadlines and logged in work hours and projects. I feel selfish when I think the money it would cost me to go home would be better spent on a trip to Egypt or Australia. Somewhere foreign and new for the same ticket price. But really, my family never wants to know when the next trip home is, they mean when am I coming back permanently. By saying never, how can I not offend someone when they ask why I wouldn’t want to be in the city or province or country they know and love.

It’s hard to admit that being away for seven years means my home town isn’t one that seems familiar to me. As it’s landscape changes, it becomes more and more foreign while England becomes the place I know best. I have a hairdresser and a waxer, a place to do my nails and a favourite coffee shop. I know the best place for a fry up and the one late night shop that has diet cherry coke and the Doritos that I love. Maybe I used to complain about the lack of 24 hour coffee shops and the lack of customer service but the longer I’m away, the less these stay in my mind.

My friend recently moved here from Canada and every place we go to is like somewhere in Vancouver or somewhere in Calgary or somewhere else from back home. Somehow I’ve lost those comparisons. Now when I’m back in my home town I think about what I’m missing from England. I’m originally from Canada but not from there anymore. I’m left thinking now as I say this, where am I from then? Where do I belong now? I’m the foreign sounding woman everyone thinks just got off the boat but who knows London feels more like home than anywhere else in the world. I may be somewhere in-between who I was then and who I am now but I’m content in knowing that for this moment, I can’t ask for anywhere better. In another ten years, we’ll see but for now I think this is where I need to stay.