Honey, Love the One You're With.

 

When I left Canada 12 years ago,  I projected chaotic events in my personal life upon the landscape and began feeling as if it was Canada who’d fallen madly out of love with me, had chewed me up and spat me out here in the North of Ireland. 

It was a season scant with choice over my own standing in the world, hemmed in by babies and uncomfortable under the new title of single mother. But I seized what choice I had left; the choice of perspective, to recall to memory or try to forget. So I swept away all of Canada, wide and expanse as it is, I severed almost all contact,  each CBC show discontinued to me, all fondness of the landscape snuffed out, Canada was dead to me and I was not visiting her grave.

I turned my focus macro and local. The day I got the keys to my new home I hung a picture on the wall that displayed the words ‘Love Your Town’.  This was the mission I assigned myself. As the song goes, If you can’t be with the one you love,  honey, love the one (town) your (stuck) with. Largely, I’ve succeeded. 

There’s been turbulence, tantruming toddlers have grown into budding teens,  jobs have changed, relationships have came & went and each time, when dust settles I find m
yself along with that dust - settled.  A settler in new uncharted path, setting up place names, and mapping each step for the next person. Handmade bunting hangs in our apple tree, displaying the letters S-T-E-E-N  C-A-S-T-L-E.  This is my queendom, where I am contented, still and calm, where Canada chewed me up and spat me out, growing new things, forgetting the old. 

But 12 years on, I arrived at the right emotional distance to consider a return.  I planned carefully, tentatively tiptoeing my way around the idea of revisiting the scene, approaching the idea like my cat taps the remote each evening, just checking it isn’t a snake. 

 When the plane flew over northern New Brunswick, all came back. Rolling forests spilling on for hundreds of miles, endless lakes and rivers for swimming, and the people, good god the people, salt of the earth, fresh faced and genuine, their voices sounding like a chorus of old friends singing me home.  I thought I might go full exposure therapy; revisit all the old haunts and meet their ghosts. But I followed my own lead and nestled into the friendliest of sanctuary instead, breathing deep, reclaiming somewhat, but also providing introductions for the me I am now to the Canada that always was.

Upon return to my castle, I’m reconciling that I now have two homes,  like taking on two lovers, I’m preoccupied and restless.  But with diary open and flight scanner bookmarked,  I know now I need not subdivide my heart nor make a spotless mind. Forgetting was simpler, but remembering is richer. Walking through the park tonight, I’m still loving the one I’m with,  announcing my place in the family of things, belonging wherever I tread.