A Note of Home

                A very good and dear friend told me recently that the West Coast Island she had emigrated to was beginning to feel like home. She was settling in, and becoming comfortable with her life in this new place. Our conversation has stayed with me, and stirred up a whirlwind of emotions within myself. Mostly, it has caused me to reflect on this notion of “home”.

                One cannot travel abroad without thoughts of home, a place of origin, a place where we can centre ourselves. It is a rather vague notion. It can describe a nation, a province, a city, or a building. It can transcend the physical and exist meta-physically as an ideal. It can refer to companionship. And it can be all of these things at one time. It is, in short, not an easily definable concept, and yet this notion of home resides within us all.

                Constantine Cavafy, the Alexandrian poet, stated in his poem “Ithaca”, that home was the place where all our voyages begin, and the place where we will return to after many years away. It is the one place that gives us everything we are, asking only that we return at the end of our travels. It “gives us the beautiful journey.”

                Robert Frost was far more pragmatic, when he hypothesized in his own epic work “Death of the Hired Man”, that home is a place where they have to take you in, as you have nowhere else to go. Silas, the aged hired man, came home, not to the place of his birth, but to the place where he knew they would take him, ragged and worn out as he was.

                Both of these notions of home have merit of their own, strike a chord deep within me, and yet both remain incomplete as a definition. The aborigines of Australia have a belief that our lives are songs, and we live out the lines of our song as we go through our days. When my own song had struck a discordant note in the North of Ontario, I was forced back south to the home of my youth. My family took me in, Silas-like. I had nowhere else to go, so they had to take me, or so I thought. When I voiced this thought to my Father, he was surprised. “No, we didn’t have to take you. We chose to.” There was comfort in that, a weary confidence that I was no Silas, that my life was not a worn tapestry yet. There was hope. Something closer to Cavafy’s Ithaca.

                Ultimately, I suppose that “home” is something both broadly defined, and yet deeply personal. An old folk-ism states that “home is where the heart is”, but that is not entirely true. To me, it is many things. It is an iron sky at gloaming, stretching away from the escarpment, to meet seamlessly with a cold steel lake out beyond the steel mills. The plumes of industry belching into the sky, the night fires blazing at the mouths of the stacks. Seeing the beauty of Hamilton in that scene. It is the smell of river mud after the spring floods have spilled the Grand over her banks. It is the roar of a black and gold crowd watching as Ozzy splits the uprights from 54 yards. It is beer with friends, and good conversation filled with laughter. It is knowing that here, be it Ithaca, a New England farm, Steel Town, or a lazy Haldimand twilight, here you have a place. That here your life resonates with song as you sing out your lines and days.

                I often long to be abroad, to live from my backpack, on the road, a traveller. But when I am away, it is this notion of home that keeps me moving into the wind, allowing my feet to search out fresh lines of song.