Going Home

One spring, in between one job ending and the other beginning, there’s a chance to go home. My sister’s up for an award and my brother has a birthday planned. I have no excuses not to go so before I know it, the travel agency is giving me a printed itinerary and they wish me a happy trip. As the plane leaves the terminal at Heathrow, I almost cry, my head leaning on the window to watch the gentle roll of green, the thatched cottages and the tiny estates surrounding each house as the world fades into clouds. England is where my life is and though my return ticket is nestled in my bag, it feels like I am never coming back. By going home, I’m regressing and will somehow lose the worldliness I’ve gained.

It’s not until 8 hours later when the clouds part and I can see the patchwork fields that spread to the horizon, that I realize I’ve missed the place I never thought I would. It’s like I’d been eating sugar for the entire journey, I’m so excited. I float through customs with a smile on my face passed squalling babies, a Japanese couple with cowboy hats and matching cameras and the British family who looks a little bit lost – like the English they’re hearing here is foreign to them. At the gate, my family stands with flowers. A pair of friends tagged along – a group of faces that have been photographs in my drawer for the past 4 years. It’s like they all see me at once and start to run – my brother throws himself at me as the others crowd around. The smell of my mom’s shampoo embraces me, the kind I get for myself when I’m homesick.

In the car, the radio blasts familiar sounds that I’m hearing for the first time. The DJ a thick Canadian sort, far removed from the BBC ones I’ve grown used to. The roads are straight and wide, and I’m transported back to being a kid. It’s all I can do to stop myself from jumping in my seat, my stomach gurgling to my throat in anticipation. I point out the window. There’s the car lot my friend’s dad owns. It’s where we borrowed a Lincoln from to go to grad in style in, a luxury of all leather interior with seats that warmed themselves. We had ummed and ahhed over that selection but were ecstatic with our choice when it snowed that May, the day before the big celebrations. Our grad dresses were merely flimsy, frilly glamour, sleeveless, cleavage revealers that we would never had dreamed of wearing before that day.

Over the next hill, and it’s the same. More flat, the fences spreading across the landscape like transparent Berlin walls. The trapped cows stared at us wide eyed as they chew and the smell of manure begins to permeate the car. We beg our dad to roll up the windows. Who cares about the warm breeze of prairie spring flooding the car when it comes with an odd spot of cow.

The face of the highway is different. As we approach Edmonton, I notice the sign welcoming us to this great city has been modified. For the whole of my existence, we have been known as the city of champions. This was the city Gretzky became great in as he led the Oilers to win multiple Stanley cups in the eighties. But. As we haven’t won anything in a long time, I understand why we had to add a little something else to the signage. We became the winner of the Cities in Bloom competition. I didn’t understand how we could have won such a prestigious award until my mom pointed out the big blue tubs half filled with marigolds and weedy flowers that littered the sides of the road. The moral must be: if you can’t get a name based on the talent of the city, then find a title you could have and stick some money in it. Works every time.

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 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, it’s home. My parents 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 moving home? It’s the hardest one to find an answer to.

Photo by Sarah Taylor; Story by Heather Taylor