I was born in Saskatoon Saskatchewan, moved to Calgary, Alberta when I was a year old, and then moved to Vernon, BC when I was 5 years old, and stayed there until I was 18, when I moved back to Calgary. I have now been in Calgary for 36 years. Can you guess which of those places feels most like home to me?
I am guessing there is some sort of scientific brain mumbo jumbo that connects memories formed during your most transformative years to your sense of home, because the place I feel most at home is in British Columbia. Actually, my heart rate calms and my mind clears as soon as I get into the mountains. But being in the Shuswap and Okanagan Valleys is so comforting, I feel like I have reunited with my beginning.
That is crazy because BC is not my beginning at all. But I have absolutely zero memories of Saskatoon since I was only one when we moved from there, and the majority of my memories of Calgary as a child are mildly trauma based. I got lost walking home in a snowstorm when I was in kindergarten. One time my brother brought a garter snake to my kindergarten class and it crawled out of the box and scared the crap out of my entire class. Also, my whole world revolved around my school and home at that age, which I don't specifically connect to the city I was in.
This last summer, I travelled to both the BC interior and Saskatoon, on two separate trips. I was only in BC for 2 days but it was like a life reset for me. Oh, look, there are the mountains from my childhood. And there is the lake from my childhood. And over there is the highway from my childhood. (When you grow up in a small town or city, you travel around to the other small towns and cities a lot, and the highway of your childhood becomes iconic.) I was in Saskatoon for 3 days, but the feeling was quite different. It was more of an intellectual knowing that I was connected to this place, because there is a hospital there that I was born in (neither my dad nor my aunt could remember what hospital it was) and places my parents worked, and somewhere, a house we lived in. I went for a long walk, and I looked at the trees and the river and the prairie landscape, and it was very nice, but it did not feel like home.
And both times, I came back to Calgary and felt at home, because my husband and children are here, the house that we own and have lived in for 22 years. The business we have built. The friends we have made. And for my children, they have lived here their whole lives and they will likely always feel this city is their home. I hope they go out and look for other places to call home, too. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it has nothing to do with where you are born or where you grow up. Maybe we are predestined to feel at home in a certain place, and you may find it when you are young, or old, or anywhere in between. My husband has lived his whole life in Calgary. He claims he feels most at home in California
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Whatever the case, I hope you all find a place that feels like home, now and in your memories.