Understand, I was only a girl
living the days as they came.
I did not know I would leave.
though I had a secret
I did not tell and will not ever,
I did not know I would leave.
(From “Translation of my Life,” by Elizabeth Spires)
“You can’t go home again,” my husband said. We were enjoying a dinner in one of Toronto’s many restaurants three weeks ago, sitting outdoors in a vine-covered patio and enjoying the long summer’s evening. We’d come to our former home city to visit family and consider options for retirement. I was, as I had been many times over the two-week stay, saying how I wished we’d never left. We’d seen old friends and found the conversation as lively and comfortable as if no time had passed between us. Daily, we’d taken long walks around the city whose lush, tree-lined neighborhoods and streets, felt as familiar as they had twenty years ago. I was suffering from a little bout of homesickness.
Toronto remains a city I love, one where after years of marital struggle and loneliness, I felt like I’d finally found myself. At the height of the Vietnam war, I’d left the U.S. for Canada with my first husband, living first in Ottawa before moving to Nova Scotia, where, a few years later, he died suddenly in a drowning accident. I left Halifax and moved with daughters to Toronto to return to graduate school. There, I discovered a city that “fit” like no other had. Yet the remembrance of the California I had grown up in lingered, and my desire to return to the West crystallized when I read Wallace Stegner’s 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Angle of Repose. A multi-layered story of marriage, the narrator, confined by a wheelchair and abandoned by his wife, intends to turn his grandmother’s papers into a novel about her life, but instead, examines the difficult marriage between his grandparents , leading him into the shadows of his own life.. In a passage I’ve never forgotten, his east coast grandmother, a New York writer and artist, marries a mining engineer, who, she reluctantly admits, was “infected with the incurable Western disease. He had his crosshairs set on the snow peaks of a vision.”
Stegner’s words lingered like a magnet, pulling me back west. Perhaps it was because I’d followed my first husband to Canada, suffered through our separation and his drowning in Nova Scotia, and still dreamt, despite the many years in Canada, of my childhood and California home. I longed to reclaim the sense of place I once knew.
Twenty-three years later, remarried to another native Californian, I returned full of hopes and expectations. But like the protagonist in Thomas Wolfe’s novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, my homecoming was laced with disappointment.
You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, …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. (From: You Can’t Go Home Again)
What I discovered, like so many emigrants before me, was that “home” no longer existed in the ways I had imagined it. It—and I—had changed. The things that drew me back to the West were now elusive.
In color photographs, my childhood house looks
fresh as an uncut sheet cake—
pale yellow buttercream, ribbons of white trim…
Half a century later, I barely recognize it
when I search the address on Google Maps
and, via “Street view,” find myself face to face—
foliage overgrown, facade remodeled and painted
a drab brown. ..
(From “9773 Comanche Ave.,” by David Trinidad)
The irony is, of course, that all the years I lived in Canada, I refused to think of it as “home.” I clung tenaciously to my golden dream of California, whose luster intensified in my imagination. Yet all the while, Canada had quietly wrapped itself around my heart. There, I grew into adulthood. I became a wife, mother and widow. I discovered friendships whose bonds were forged out of the steel of years of struggle and hardship, friendships that have endured despite time and distance. Canada became a part of me as surely as the California of my youth. But it took leaving it to realize how much my Canadian years had defined me. It took leaving it and returning to the place I once called home.
We’ve now lived in California for as long as we lived in Canada. The irony is that I never re-discovered that same sense of place and belonging I once took for granted. We talk now of perhaps returning to Canada, at least for part of our time, but I wonder, can I rediscover that sense of belonging as I once did? “Home is where the heart is,” Gaius Plinius Secundas, wrote nearly two thousand years ago. Countless authors, writing about home, have echoed it since.
Goethe once wrote that all writers are homesick, that all writers are really searching for home. Being a writer is being on a constant search for where you belong. It comes out of a place of memory, not geography. (Mary Morris, “Looking for Home”)
I guess it comes down to change– in a place and in ourselves. Even if we’ve never left a place, the events of our lives can make us feel as if we’ve suddenly become strangers to it. Cancer, loss, or trauma can have that same effect. We feel as if we’ve crossed the border into some strange, new territory, where the customs and nuances are unfamiliar. You long for home, the place you once knew by heart, but you discover that you can never, as Wolfe suggested, be at home as you once were.
What does it mean to be “at home?” Have you returned to a once familiar place to find that you are no longer part of it as you once were? What did you learn? Has an experience like cancer, loss, or other life challenges made it difficult to regain the sense of belonging to a place and its people—or cemented it? How has “home” changed for you over the years? Write about home, leaving, returning or finding it.