home (hōm) n: i. habitat, abode, dwelling; ii. place one lives with the pleasant connotations or family ties included

My love of the West was cultivated in grade three, when my dad and my brother and I drove through the mountains to Vancouver Island to attend my Auntie Denise’s wedding (my mom flew and met us there). It was a beautiful drive. We stopped at the side of the road and drank from a waterfall. We saw baby bears. We stole peaches from an orchard. We camped at the KOA on the ocean, where I met my first boyfriend, whose name was Aaron (I think). Suzanne Vega’s “My Name is Luka” played incessantly on the radio. And I lost the Precious Moments picture of a girl praying at her bedside that my Baba got me for successfully completing catechism (I think I would have had to stab the priest in the eye with a willow stick to fail). Ah, the West. I truly do love you, Prairies and Mountains and Biggest Baddest Ocean Going. So WHY I AM CHEATING ON YOU??

Before Adoring and Wonderful Husband and I moved to Ontario, the forewarnings of just how mean Upper Canadians could be were startling. For a sheltered prairie girl like myself who only knew Ontario as the nasty province that constantly bullied Quebec (or so all my political textbooks enlightening me on the French fact would seem to suggest), it was enough to make my stomach knot in trepidation at the thought of my first day of school, as though I was waiting to cash in on my two front teeth and barely potty trained once again. Thankfully the grad program in which I enrolled pretty much held my hand for the entire ten months, and thankfully that guy who was married to that girl who worked with my mom and who had lived in Ontario for all of 18 months was totally and completely wrong about how boorish Ontarians actually are. (Or maybe he wasn’t in error, but rather misinterpreted aplomb for insolence, a crime for which my fellow Kanadarios are often accused and convicted of.) Nonetheless, this province has grown on me, something I’ve found lately to be Very. Disturbing. Indeed.

I expected to come back from my travels this past week to the Holy Land with renewed resolve to get the BLEEP! outta here. Aside from the obscene distance from loved ones, there was no particular reason for wanting to leave, other than “it sure ain’t the West! Yee Haw!” Granted, I can’t really call the driving we did last week up and down Broad and Albert Streets a true representation of what it’s like to call the earlier time zones to the left of the Peg home, though I did nonetheless come back with a renewed (or just new) appreciation for what we have here: good jobs, great scenery, fabulous friends. And while that doesn’t mean we’ve necessarily decided not to call the flatlands (or maybe even the footlands) home sometime in the not-so-distant future, it does mean that I will accept our nation’s capital for what it has been to us for the last two years, and will be for at least one more spin round the sun: pretty darned homey for a place that may never really be home.