Be It Ever So Humble

Tags

British Columbia, friends, home, moving, Nova Scotia, travel

I had a new experience this year, while “home” for Christmas in Nova Scotia.

…I missed home.

West Coast home.

…Things have changed.

While I spent my early childhood in Ontario and the Caribbean before settling in Nova Scotia, the Maritimes were always “home” to me.

I loved my home town and my university fiercely, and I have made many, many, many posts about how much I miss it, and how much I love the close-knit culture of the East Coast. Perfect Husband, who grew up on the South Shore, feels the same.

It used to be that whenever we traveled back to Nova Scotia, we would be hyper-vigilant to change: That store moved to a different location! That other store is gone! Someone repainted that house! They put in a STOP SIGN!

Things change all the time, slowly, but when you’re only home once every year or two you see them all at once, and it feels like you have entered some sort of strange parallel universe where everything looks slightly wrong.

Perfect Husband especially would get indignant about changes made to his neighbourhood back home (which is the sort of neighbourhood where people look out the windows and wonder “who is that?” when they see an unfamiliar car).  It hurt him to see developers come in and destroy his old stomping grounds and built large vacation homes on top. It hurt more when one of the wealthy retirees who moved into those houses called the home where he and his four siblings grew up a “quaint little cottage”.

That was his home, and it has been largely plowed over and rebuilt, and he resents it.

But we have come to accept over the years that Nova Scotia is not our personal museum, and now it has gotten to the point where I am surprised by what hasn’t changed after all this time: The local convenience store is still there, with the same sign. My favourite Pita Place, still going strong. The neighbourhood houses which seem to have used the exact same Christmas lights for the past twenty years.

The changes no longer faze me. I have accepted that life goes on. I’m just delighted by what stays the same.

Nova Scotia has also emptied itself. Most of my friends have evacuated in search of jobs that suit their education level. Of the remaining old friends and relatives, I only saw a couple. Traveling was challenging for us with two kids in tow, and they didn’t have the time or inclination to travel to see us. They were all busy with their own lives and kids during the holidays and I am just not relevant to those lives any longer.

It isn’t their fault, it’s mine – I’m the one who left. Besides, with Facebook I can still chat with them and see pictures of them and their families, so maybe the need to see each other in person is less urgent because of that.

Really, I was touched by the couple of people who did take time out of their day to meet up with me when I was passing through their region. The holidays are a busy time, and the weather was not always great. So it meant a lot to me when they did.

Nova Scotia just… doesn’t belong to me any more, and it doesn’t miss me or need me. I felt strangely superfluous on this visit, except among immediate family.

Meanwhile, BC has been growing on me slowly for a long time. It took me years to start putting down real roots, and up to a few years ago I desperately missed Nova Scotia and wanted to go home.

But I finally built a strong support network of friends. Besides, the mountains and the cherry blossoms get to you over time, and I have started to take pride in the beauty.

I loved the look on my Mother In Law’s face on her first week staying with us last year, when she saw crocuses coming up. Just small trips around town had her amazed.

“I went to the grocery store and they had FLOWERS on display outside!”

“…isn’t that normal?”

“Carol, it’s JANUARY!”

“Wait until you see the fruit and vegetable market. It doesn’t have walls.”

And when my parents came out, they kept taking pictures of daffodils while their friends back home sent them photos of snow piles up past their shoulders.

It made me proud, because BC is starting to feel like it is mine.

 

 

I love the early spring, and the long, dry, but not-too-hot summers. I love the snow on the mountains, and the mix of skin colours, languages, cultures and cuisines all around us.

So, while I cherished every day of our time with the family, and I ate a lot of pitas, it also felt really good to come home. I missed our bed, our bathroom, and even our cluttered, toy-laden living room and minuscule kitchen.

It’s not perfect, but it’s ours.

And I kept getting texts from my friends here, asking when they could see me, now that I was finally back… back home.

Saying Goodbye To Old Times

Tags

Alzheimer's, Christmas, family, home, Nova Scotia, time, traditions

Our Christmas home in Nova Scotia felt sort of… final, to me, this year.

We plan to spend next Christmas here in BC because it is expensive to travel during the holidays, and it makes a stressful time just that much more stressful. Our next trip to Nova Scotia will probably be during the summer when more people will be free to get together with us, and travel is safer and cheaper.

Although the snow was certainly a thrilling novelty to Owl.

My father’s Alzheimer’s is slowly progressing. He still knows who everyone is, and what is going on, but he is frail, and quiet, and easily confused. My mother has to help him shower, get dressed, and she puts him down to bed for naps and at bed time like a child.

But he’s still Dad.

If and when we spend another Christmas in Nova Scotia, the person that I know as my father may have faded away entirely.

Christmas was always a big deal in our house. Both my parents love Christmas, and we used to have all sorts of traditions built up around it. The annual tree decorating was so idyllic that my high school friends used to attend it too, because it was just such a Christmassy THING.

But many of the traditions have fallen by the wayside one by one what with my commitments to Perfect Husband’s family, and my father’s illness, and the fact simply that time is moving on and things change.

We did still decorate the tree this year. Mum needed PH to help bring the tree in and get it set up. The last time we were home, Dad could still do that. He still sat and watched us decorate while he sipped egg nog, but once upon a time he would have been the one pouring the drinks and sloshing too much rum into everyone’s nog.

The decorators this year were mostly Mum and Owl, with me alternately helping, taking photos, and watching the baby. It was the same, but not the same, at the same time.

If that makes sense.

Meanwhile, the Christmas Eve traditions on PH’s side of the family are going to be changing soon, too. Their Christmas Eve family gathering had the same food, the same schedule, but less exuberance. My nieces and nephews are older now. The next youngest to Owl is already ten years old, and most of them are young adults in university and beyond.

Our kids were definitely the hit of the show.

We got a family photo of all of the “kids”, including Fritter, on the front steps. We don’t know when another group photo will be able to be taken as the grown “kids” start moving away and living their own lives.

I’m really glad we made it home this Christmas, because I felt like I was getting a chance to say goodbye to these old traditions and accept that things are changing.

Owl got to experience and explore these “old times”, and I got to make my peace with their passing.

And these changes don’t have to feel bad. But they will be different.

Maybe that is okay. Maybe it is time for us to build our own traditions, here, at home.

A Week in Wisconsin – Part Of Owl’s Heritage

Tags

family, home, in-laws, travel, wisconsin

Well, here we are, home.

Our week with Perfect Husband’s relatives in Wisconsin was an odd combination of relaxing and incredibly exhausting.

On the one hand, we mostly just hung around his grandmother’s house. There was a lot of watching baseball on TV, listening to repetitive stories, and meeting distant in-laws that I will never see again.

On the other hand, we mostly just hung around his grandmother’s house. There was a lot of watching baseball on TV, listening to repetitive stories, and meeting distant in-laws that I will never see again.

I felt like I had to mind my p’s and q’s at all times, because PH has terrified me with stories about his grandmother, who did have a penchant for recounting memories of times when she felt insulted, and graphic descriptions of the violence she wanted to commit in return (I heard the phrase “My, I wanted to jest to punch her face in!” far too many times).

In reality, she was perfectly sweet to me and just doted on little Owl. “C’mere and let me feed you!” she barked at him regularly, and then she’d chuckle as she spoon-fed him yogurt. “He’s just like a little bird!”

But I still lived in fear. PH told me not to read in front of her, because apparently the sight of other people reading has been known to insult her in the past. So mostly I just sat.

When possible we made excursions. We took PH’s mother and Owl to a Brewer’s game and we drove up to Green Bay where PH and his sister drooled over Lambeau Field and Owl toddled around going “Foot. Ball. Foot. Ball.”

But mostly, it was relatives, relatives, and more relatives.

Only one of these relations actually showed up for our wedding, so I hadn’t met most of them. PH barely recognized many of them himself, and had no idea who others were. His American branch of the family doesn’t have much in common with the Canadian side.

Our stay with his distant relations involved a lot of racking my brain for polite rejoinders to announcements like these:

“Women must be stupid for going through the pain of childbirth more’n once.”

“We were so poor even the black kids weren’t allowed to play with us!”

“Mormon’s aren’t Christians!”

“I just had the most blessed bowel movement!” 

Ultimately, even though everyone was very nice to me, I was relieved to leave. I think it was more exhausting to my introvert sensibilities than all of Las Vegas.

But Owl certainly learned a lot about sports while we were there – PH is delighted.

A vignette from small town Nova Scotia

Tags

home, Nova Scotia, small towns, travel, university towns

As I drive down the main drag, I fiddle with the radio, but am completely unable to find a station that is not playing country music. So I navigate the familiar road while a singer warbles

I took him honky-tonking and that was it,

he took to it like a pig to mud, cow to cud.

We all got a hillbilly bone down deep inside!

I park in a parking lot which is really a large mud patch and walk into the local Irish pub which, even though school is out, contains small groups of university students nursing microbrewery ales.

The waitress smiles and asks me if I’m waiting for my friends, referring to them by name.

As I sip a diet Pepsi, conversations spill over from the nearby tables. They are the sort of conversations that you find everywhere in a small university town, where beer, liberalism, and literature are rampant in equal proportions.

“Did you know that Stephen Colbert lost, like, half his family in a plane crash?”

“No! Really?”

“Yeah, he’s had a really rough life. Apparently…”

—

“Have you read Angels in America?”

“No, I keep meaning to, though.”

“It’s really good. It’s actually referenced in The Laramie Project, and…”

My friend arrives and former conversations from my last visit home are picked up seamlessly, as though no time has passed.

“So some one actually thought to tell those African women that diarrhea is a “hot” disease, and they need to give their children water to cool it. That made sense to them in a way that “dehydration” never did, so they actually did give their children more water, and fewer children died.”

“It’s interesting how language affects our perception of reality. The words for tomorrow and yesterday are the same in Hindi, so I actually tend to get those days confused…”

I’m home.

Staying positive

Tags

Christmas, floors, home

The three best pieces of news in my current life:

1. It looks like Perfect Husband might get another torch relay when the torch swings back this way.

2. Only 14 more sleeps ’til I go home for Christmas!

3. The damn flooring guy finally decided to show up and put in the correct linoleum, transforming our kitchen from an ugly festering mess to a delightful and rather Tuscan looking haven.

As a reminder, this is the wrong floor:

FINALLY, the right floor:

Of course, the floor guy said he had to come back to put some kind of sealant on the linoleum where it joined with the laminate, and then he never showed up, but that’s a minor thing, surely…

Choice

Tags

Halifax, home, Nova Scotia, traffic, Vancouver

“I hate this city. I want to go home.”

My husband and I were walking back to our car after a very stressful evening. I had spent most of it in traffic, trying to get to a party my work was throwing for its amazing volunteers. The party had been fine, but I had spent most of it wrestling with time and distance and rush hour traffic, and the fact that this city, despite swelling to two million people, still has road systems more appropriate for Nova Scotia than for a bustling metropolis. I didn’t know shortcuts, and none of my coworkers had thought to tell me that you couldn’t go from my house, to the party site, help set up, and get back to get my husband off of the train (since we needed him to be Santa)  in the amount of time allotted. It didn’t occur to them that I wouldn’t know that, and it wasn’t their job to think of it. I missed dinner. Santa was horribly late. I was angry and miserable and full of self loathing.

“Okay,” Perfect Husband said calmly, looking at his wife who was stressed beyond belief and near tears. “If that’s how you feel. We can go home.”

I looked at him sideways. Was he calling my bluff?

“I know we can’t go home,” I muttered.

“Yes… love… we can,” he said seriously.

“How. How can we go home?” I accused.

“It’s easy.” He spoke as if to a little child. “You quit your job. I quit mine. I could request a transfer but I might not get one. We sell the townhouse. It would bring more than enough to buy a real house back home.”

The possibilities flew past my mind in an instant. Back home, with a house. Where I know every nook, cranny, and short cut. Where a 12 inch pizza isn’t called a “large” and doesn’t cost 22 dollars. Near my family. Near his family. Near our friends. White Christmases. A real house. Home.

…Quitting my job, which is my dream job. Dragging my husband from the city which he still loves. Bringing our future children into the Nova Scotia public school system. High taxes. No jobs.

“No,” I said decisively. “I’m not ready to do that. I’m not giving up yet.”

But the freedom of knowing I could took a little weight off of my shoulders. I’m not stuck here. I choose to be here.

Run from the paint, children, RUN!

Tags

decorating, floors, home, house, mothers, painting

Guess what! We got our house last Thursday. Isn’t that GREAT?

Except that the walls were painted a stark grey that made the place seem as warm and welcoming as Alcatraz. The kind of colour that the landlord clearly must have picked because he wanted to communicate to his tenants “THIS IS NOT YOUR HOME AND YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE.”

INTERNMENT-CAMP GREY IS ALL THE RAGE THESE DAYS, RIGHT?

The message must have been heard loud and clear, because the tenants had made their best efforts to scratch and mark and damage the walls in as many places as possible during their tenancy. One wall was SO marked and dented that all my friends exclaimed on it when they arrived. The greatest part of Saturday was spent spackling, sanding, and washing the walls. Friends who showed up to paint ended up having spackling trowels handed to them, and spent the subsequent hours on their hands and knees, trying to make the walls look more like walls, and less like swiss cheese.

As the day wore on, though, the dingy and unwelcoming house which we had just bought began to take on a new and cheerful feel. Slowly, my personality was spreading through the place, with tendrils reaching from the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the bedrooms.It was transforming from internment camp to… home.

From grey kitchen to sunny kitchen

Up the stairs...

Past the landing...

Then… everyone stopped for the day. People had to go home. Only half the painting was done. I had to teach a puppy class the next morning. Three people pledged to come back after I was done class, and they did. But when they called it a day, there was STILL more to be done. I began to fall apart. It was all so overwhelming. The flooring guys were due to come in that coming week. We had to move the next weekend. There were still some Alcatraz walls and I wanted them gone. The only room I had given permission to ignore was the future baby’s room – decorating a nursery in advance of any kind of pregnancy seems like counting chickens before they hatch. The painting jobs stretched on and on… I would never be done. One day, old and toothless, I would totter into the bedroom and announce

“I finished painting the bathroom today.”

“WHAT?” Perfect Husband would holler, adjusting his hearing aid.

So Monday night after work, Perfect Husband and I went back. I started on touch-ups downstairs while he gathered up drop cloths from the stairs to move into the bathroom. He found green paint spots on the stairs.

“Fuck!” he said, “how did that happen?”

He ripped another drop cloth off of the floor. “FUCK!” And another… “FUCK!”

They were everywhere. Paint splotches on the stairs. In the upstairs hall. The master bedroom. The computer room.  Yellow and green.

I once had a dream that shining yellow paint was oozing through the ceiling, landing in splotches at my feet. I knew that if it touched me, I would die. I ran to my parent’s room, seeking safety in my mother’s arms.

“It’s too late,” my father told me, “it touched her. She’s dying.”

Now it seemed like it was back, magically appearing under drop cloths, poisoning my new home. The downstairs floors were all slated to be replaced, but I had preferred to leave the carpet upstairs, so that little sock feet could run down the stairs in future years without slipping. Perfect Husband scrubbed grimly at the stairs while I miserably touched up thin spots on the walls downstairs. The paint didn’t want to come up. I faced the horrifying realization that we might have to redo the upstairs floors, too. Another two thousand dollars. A rush to either pick up new carpet, or a last minute decision to risk small people tumbling down the stairs by extending the laminate flooring up the stairwell. Then we would have to get the guy in to measure it, and convince him to install it before we moved in on Saturday. It was too impossible, too terrible for words.

“We’ll look up a way to get it out,” Perfect Husband assured me.”Now let’s paint a bathroom.”

So we did.

The next night I called my mother AND my decorating-expert friend and moaned to them for a good hour and a half. Finally I had to face the fact that:

a) I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I KNEW that I could get the paint splotches off the carpet

b) that it was becoming ridiculously late and

c)… I wanted my mommy. If Mum were within 500 kilometres of me I know she would have been there, armed with special paint removing solutions and a scrub brush, got down on her knees, and not risen until my carpet was saved. But she’s SIX THOUSAND KILOMETRES AWAY. I’m married and a homeowner. I’m supposed to be all grown up, but once again I just wanted to run from those paint splotches right into my mother’s protective arms. For the first time it really hit me how badly I miss having my mother at my beck and call.

But my mother couldn’t come save me, so instead, I set out at ten o’clock at night armed with nail polish remover, oxyclean and rubbing alcohol (all scrounged from the bathroom cupboard) to try and remove paint from carpet. Perfect Husband stayed behind to continue packing. Alone in my new home that night, I learned two more things – I may not be my mother, but I could get paint out of a carpet and… hire professionals next time.