Cliché, I know, but I want to start off this post with that song. It’s been something I’ve turned over in my mind a lot, because it’s a concept I’ve struggled with for a long time.
I have lived in 10 houses over my lifetime. Only one of those was before I can remember (as I’m told, a small log cabin in Bragg Creek, AB). I don’t think the number of houses has made me uncomfortable with the concept of home. It’s certainly about the feeling: belonging. For various reasons, my connection with where I belong has been tenuous. Part of it was teenage angst. I was forced to move out before my grade 12 graduation, and slept on an air mattress in a friend’s basement for 4 months till uni started. In Lethbridge, a shitty roommate and post-high school fallout made my first year difficult. What that taught me was that part of home was about the people I was with, so I left that situation for somewhere more positive. After my first year, I wound up with this truly bizarre but loveable family of 3 siblings. They more or less took me in as one of their own, and in their own way, each of them still makes their presence felt in my life. I also believed significantly in “nesting,” for lack of a better word. A lot of work went into making my room a space where I wanted to spend a lot of my time. In each case, it was cozy – stuffed to the brim with books, art and keepsakes of all the significant and insignificant moments in my life, and with a decent sized window to let in the sunlight and fresh air. On some days it would smell like fall back home in the foothills, and I missed that a little bit. All the same, a room in a house isn’t a home, and I never felt as if I wholly belonged. Something was missing. I began to dismiss the idea of home altogether. For a long while, I wondered about whether I really needed to have roots. I thought maybe being me was my own roots. In many ways, I am still convinced of that. But at the time, it really wasn’t enough for me, and even in a room that I had made my own, I felt a bit empty. I felt pretty far from everyone I thought or wanted to be important. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap. For a summer, Gordon and I lived together in Ottawa. It was our first time living together. It was right. And we came back to Lethbridge and we moved in together and it was right. But in a way it wasn’t. I certainly wasn’t unhappy with him, or with the others in the house. I felt like I was squishing in to a place where I didn’t quite fit, but that was tolerating me. In my second last year of university, one of the last things I had to write about for that year was about my Querencia. It’s a Spanish word that represents the idea of a place that reflects your being, and that you go to recharge or reset. It represents safety and comfort and vulnerability. It’s yours. We were to write for 10 minutes. I left that day with not a single thing written down. I still didn’t know where it was or what it was. Briefly, I wondered if maybe I should think about who it was. In the end, I decided this was too much pressure for other people, and not really true to who I am and how I work. I am too much of myself. People are important, but they can’t be my roots. For the last three years, Gordon and I have talked about building a house. Very few know we’ve actually put those plans into action. We will be building a large dome out on the family land in Cayley with a nice view of the foothills and a tolerable amount of the prairies. It will be a place that is our own. A space that we love. It will be full of plants and sunlight and color. It will have gardens and lilac bushes and apple trees. I’ll grow tea and herbs. It will be full of books. We’ll have rocking chairs on the porch. It will be calm. It will be ours. It will be us. I’m in Rwanda now, and I’m coming back to Canada. Home here meant a carefully curated room of things that I loved, and some things to entertain me, because that’s all I had at the end of the day in a foreign country I loved but didn’t know. It also meant a lot about who I spent my spare time with. I’ve been exceptionally, incredibly lucky in this respect. But this is not home, nor did I intend for it to entirely feel that way. A lot of my dreams about Canada didn’t have much to do with Lethbridge streets or brown coulees. There’s a bit of the prairies, but I feel a strong calling to be close to the mountains. My dreams had to do with too-long games of Catan with a bunch of geography nerds; with a flurry of scarves whipped into a gypsy costume by my little nieces; with the antics of my cat who doesn’t know he’s a cat; with endless 80s playlists and Horrible Histories references; with lengthy conversations about all the important things in education; and with the quiet nights at home with a nice cuppa, and a nicer fella (this list is absolutely not exhaustive, obviously). That said, I think as I’ve been travelling around this past year, I’ve been leaving a piece of my heart everywhere. A part will stay in the land of a thousand green hills. A part will stay in Cape Town, with its weird little bits of character sticking out around corners, and its mountains, and its foothills, and its ocean breeze. A part will stay in Darjeeling, India, high in misty mountains, vibrant with Nepalese prayer flags, and full of tea. A part will stay in Zanzibar, close to remote white northern beaches with endless white sand. The important thing here is that, really, my heart is still full. I’ve given myself the excuse and the freedom to belong to a number of places at once. And maybe that’s what belonging should be. So back to the cliché song at the start of this post. At first, when I heard this song (and still, depending on my mood), I read this as having someone to build a home with. I won’t deny the importance of that, or of a community of significance in general. But the most important thing I’ve learned in Rwanda, and what’s changed my reading of this song, is that my definition of home, or belonging, will regularly be in flux, and will never be simple. I am insular. If I don’t like a situation, I retreat into myself. I’m comfortable in my own company. As long as my self is balanced, I’m home. I guess what I’ve learned for now is that home is with me. I’ve not got a lot of strong roots in any particular location. But as long as I have trees and plants and sunshine and tea and books and a good soundtrack, I think I’ll be all right.
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Meagan Fullerton-LeeMeagan is an aspiring teacher, voracious reader, tentative motorcyclist, and passionate gardener. In all things she sees education. Here she shares her passions. Archives
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