Mid-stream & horseless
It occurred to me the other day that, few years from now, I’ll have lived as long in France as I have in my native land.
While that holds no thrilling significance for anyone else, reaching this curious midpoint is wreaking certain havoc with inner landscapes. I’m beginning to feel like a true expatriate from what I still call home (despite no intentions of returning). Faithful to my roots, I’m still obscenely polite but, to be frank, I keep up with Canada’s dramas only out of an odd sense of duty. They seem terribly remote by and large, and I don’t even know half the players. Le hockey strike, qu’est-ce que c’est?
(Truth be told, regardless of where I’m living, I’m unable to sustain a daily hunger for local politics, and have found that they’re as easy and enjoyable to take a break from as any soap opera.)
More unsettling still is that once thick and brash memories of every nuance of my hometown are becoming increasingly grainy, jittery old home movies. Years ago, when pangs arose, I’d walk from end to end of the city in my head, cutting through this park, and down that street because that’s where we… I could remember every texture, smell and hum of the place, presuming always that its dominion over my mindscape would remain absolute.
But my brain has become a miasma of city and small town maps overlapping. The narrow cobblestone street of one town turns into the village square of the next; Paris becomes Pompignan becomes Avignon becomes… and I can’t remember anyone’s name. The once overwhelming certainty and small comfort of unshakeable roots is gone. Canada’s on its way to becoming a fabled and far-off land, and I’ll never have the history with my adopted home, blithe absorption of childhood, for our relationship to boast visceral entanglement, full and mutual understanding.
Now, this is by no means a tragic situation – I chose it on purpose, after all – but I am reminded from time to time of Nelson Mandela’s line that goes something like this: If you speak to a man in a language he understands, you speak to his mind. But if you speak to a man in his own language, you speak to his heart.
While I don’t miss Canada in any dire way (or February there in particular), I do sometimes miss the way it speaks to my heart.
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Comment
- While the lengthiest period of time I was away from home (Canada) was only one month (when I was in France), I missed Canada so much. I was having such a wonderful time, but I was terribly nostalgic for my country. I love living here; I really do. And I even hate winter.
— Randa Nov 14, 10:32pm # - Oh! Did you know the hockey strike is over?
— Randa Nov 14, 10:32pm # - More importantly—do you care?!
— Randa Nov 14, 10:33pm # - On-tari-ari-ari-o.
I was never Canadian for more than three or four weeks at a time, but I miss it. I grew up within sight of the CN Tower and I failed to wear my aluminininininium foil hat. I miss Pierre Berton and Pierre Trudeau. I miss Wayne Gretzky and Wayne & Schuster. I miss Elwy Yost and… well, I miss Elwy Yost, damn it, and I Mississauga. I miss listening to Canadians.
I miss little solid pieces of America: a street or two in Cambridge and Boston, a sunny front room with a Sunday Times, a certain woods in Western New York State, someone’s front step, someone else’s old car, a railway crossing, a sloped stretch of grass under a tree.
But now that I’ve been away from that continent for twelve and a half years, an eighth of a century, more than a quarter of my life, I’ve been here long enough to miss (and forget) things here, never mind there. I’ve still got a lot of time before I’ll have lived longer here than there, but I feel as if I’ve been conscious longer here than there. I think I was never alone enough until I stopped, unless I concentrated on it, understanding the gabble around me.
— eeksypeeksy Nov 14, 11:17pm # - And it can even more localised, can’t it?
After many summers in the North Okanagan Valley, and an absence of a year and a half back here in Southern Ontario, I miss the rugged landscape; the wide open spaces; the cowboys and dope-growers; the schizoid right/left politics; the way they say heh? instead of eh? – the way they all hate Toronto. And yet this place seemed so exotic and unknowable ten years ago…
And when I return to Northern Superior, the summers of my youth, I’m breathless from the rocks and trees and water. I taste innocence and adventure and solitude again.
O Dominion, hear me call!
— moj Nov 15, 12:24am # - I have been posting comments on “Oliver” for lo these past few months but today is the first time that I found your link to this site.
I think that I understand what you are saying about Canada, but I know that nothing quickens the heartbeat more than returning home and catching sight of Newfoundland.
For many years we visited Provence for two weeks every September or October and I hope that we will be able to go back again next year. We usually stay in or around Lourmarin.
Some years ago I spend two weeks doing volunteer work rebuilding stone walls in the old village of St. Victor la Coste. Great experience but still nice to come ‘home’.
— john Nov 15, 2:11pm # - As usual, thanks for this beautiful post. i feel the same way about Canada—have been away for 12 years now, and with an academic career (or what is nominally both academic and a career, though i sometimes wonder, but probably best not to!) I doubt I’ll ever end up back there. And now that i’m reading Wendell Berry and Wallace Stegner and other writers so entrenched in place and LAND, so attached to the particulars of geography, i’m a bit jealous that I don’t have the same. I think of Canada and i feel instant comfort, a sense of home in spite of the fact that I know almost noone there save my family, and in spite of (or perhaps because of?) the fact that I possess no belongings there. it’s almost like there’s a mutual sense of understanding—almost like an old friend i haven’t seen in years, but who still gets me on a fundamental level.
And then time and more time passes. I’m not sure where the attachment stems from any longer, and why i still consider it home, and imagine it to contain stronger roots than it does.
— Julia Nov 15, 3:46pm # - Ah, I left my home and native land a year and some ago to move to Ireland. I had grand, romantic notions of what it would be like to live and work in Europe. I’ve been sadly disappointed at times and startled at times by the beauty I find here. But, nothing compares to home (Vancouver Island). I miss the bright, blue sky days of January. The warmth of strong sunlight on my skin in the summer. I think most of all I miss the Pacific ocean and the West coast life that goes with it.
I’ve signed up for another tour of duty (aka, extended my work permit for another year). We’ll see how much/if any longer I stay after this year if finished.
I miss Canada, but I wonder if it will be the same nostalgic Canada I remember when I finally return home.
— michelle Nov 15, 10:39pm # - home is where joni is . having said that i did feel a tremendous pang hearing felicity Lott singing roses of Picardie on the radio the other day.
I loved a song once called ‘Lost in France’. No idea who sang it. Little did I know it would turn out to be about me.
..and you too?
— ruth Nov 15, 11:19pm # - Ha! I haven’t been “home” in over two years and we decided to make the big journey as a family this coming FEBRUARY of all times of year. People in Canada are happy but confused as to why we would leave Provence for such god-awful weather, and I give the logical explanation that it’s because we want to travel before Charlotte turns two so we don’t have to pay full fare. But deep inside of me there is this nostalgic longing for sparking snow, catching flakes on my tongue, making snow angels, tobogganing, finding deer tracks in the moonlight, all those childhood memories that have been sugar-coated with nothing but happiness, obliviating any horrors of getting my tongue stuck to the porch rail, or cold snot running down my nose but being unable to wipe it away because there are hundreds of little ice balls clinging to my wool mittains, to name a few.
I’m sure the beauty and wonder of it all will disappear after the first few times we have to shovel out the car, or race back into the house, remove all the layers and unzip all the zips to extract the toddler from her snowsuit because she decided she had to go wee as soon as she stepped outside.
But I still can’t wait…
— Mara B Nov 16, 3:26pm # - It’s interesting what you say EeksyP about but I feel as if I’ve been conscious longer here than there. The fact of having only an adult relationship with a place certainly alters one’s perspective. I have no idyllic childhood memories of France, the kind that create everlasting parental-like ties with a place. And of course I miss Elwy Yost too.
And I think Mara’s acknowledgement that she’s willingly forgetting how lousy February is in Canada for those who’ve been enduring winter since November (knowing that the end is still nowhere in sight), is a great example of how powerful lingering memories of the comforts and magic of childhood. And how natural the desire to revisit them.
The snowstorms alone will probably be enough to make you giddy with nostalgia, tempered only by your little one saying, “Mommy, I have to pee” after you’ve just spent 20 minutes getting her snowsuit on.
— gail Nov 17, 10:19am # - I moved from Vancouver Island to Ontario and I feel like I’m on another planet. I can only imagine what France must feel like and I imagine it better than Ontario.
— jaime Nov 17, 5:53pm # - BTW, have you read Nancy Huston’s collection of essays on culture exile – “Losing north: musings on land, tongue and self”? It was first published in French as “Nord perdu”. A good read in both languages. I often talk about my “linguistic selves” and how I find I have different personalities in French and English. Huston talks about this in her essays, and you can even get a feel for it when reading the French and English versions in succession. She also touches on your mid-stream and horseless situation of having lived in Paris longer than her native Calgary, but how wheatfields, graineries and belting out country tunes in a pick-up hold far more weight in her memory. Also interesting is how these memories cannot be shared with her own French-born children, and how their powerful childhood pull will be to Paris. In my earlier post, I talk about my snow nostaglia. Even as I write I have images of cross-country skiing in my mind, my mother racing off ahead of all, the swish swish of her skis, to have hot chocolate waiting to warm our frozen hands when we got home. My kids will never “know” this, no matter how many trips we make back to the homeland. Instead, they look for wild boar tracks in the mud, collect wild rosemary for me to season their supper, and ride tricycles around age-old fountains.
Funny, some days it makes me sad, and some days it makes me smile. After all, they are their own little selves, who came from me, but are not extensions of me.
— Mara B Nov 20, 1:50pm # - When I was growing up, I used to dream about and long for a life outside of Canada. Canada felt so dull and predictable and staid to me, where as life in other countries seemed in my mind to have a vibrancy that my homeland was missing.
As I’ve grown older and travelled to the different countries I dreamt about, I’ve come to really value not only Canada as a country, but the whole idea of what it is to be Canadian. I know this sounds painfully patriotic, but I’ve realized that there’s something about Canada, as dull as it can sometimes be, that works in a way that I haven’t found elsewhere.
This awareness has become even stronger after 9/11. I suppose sleeping next to the elephant, as Trudeau once said, has that effect.
But I completely understand what you’re saying. I think it’s like remembering a first love; everything that comes afterwards is somehow tied to and compared with this initial experience, and no matter if your memories are good, bad, or ambivalent, they will still remain the first.
— neil Nov 20, 5:56pm #
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