we've just been to calgary for our friends suzette and tonya's wedding, and took a few days at the end to kick around wild rose country. j's been wanting to take this trip for a while - the loop of highways and back roads that wind through the rockies and open out into endless plains and big big big alberta sky. j grew up in alberta, worked in jasper, started growing her adult skin, maybe, on the columbia icefields, in bear country and backstage of the ski-hilly glitz of banff and the CP majesty of lake louise. her alberta a slightly different landscape than that of oil fields and rodeo kings. we didn't see any of that alberta - at least not up close and personal - but the swell of calgary's freeways attests to the prosperity of oil and gas, and i've a suspicion that the bootjack in the basement of her dad's suburban home isn't just for show.
it's always a bit of a trip - literal and otherwise - to walk through the childhood museums of your partner's heart. there's family, of course: the meet and greet, putting faces to the names of people who have been central foils - the heroes, the villains, the clowns - in the fables of the beloved's youth. there's the pointing out of landmarks: old houses, sites of first kisses, the well-worn and not-quite-forgotten paths from schools to home. there are stories full of people in cameo roles, whose names you commit to memory like you're playing concentration. the memorable stops on the route your partner took to become the person - the one standing next to you, the one you wake up with, the one you love - that you think you know inside and out. you probably don't.
maybe the thing about travelling with someone, and probably too about travelling solo, is that you end up tripping into all kinds of unexpected tenses. past, present, future conditional. home becomes a shifting state of mind; we have, have had, so many different homes. so coming home to the now-home, the here-home, is a little bit jarring. a little bit suspect, even, for the inevitability of its underlying transience.
and here, on this toronto street, in this toronto morning, the leaves have come out on the trees in our absence. everything looks different. smells different. and our stuff is still our stuff, and our animals still remember us, and our friends still know where we live. but things are kind of different. or maybe we are. still, it's nice to be home, whatever that means.
simon and garfunkel - homeward bound
No comments:
Post a Comment