Home.

Some years ago, in my sophomore year of college, I took a class on myth. For one assignment, we were asked to write about a classical myth that had parallels in our own lives. At the time, I was still in the final stages of a serious, live-in relationship with the man in Victoria whom, I assumed, I would one day marry. I was dividing my time between Victoria, where he lived with my things, and Ottawa, where I rented a room and shared a house with a woman and her 10 year-old son and went to school. It was a pretty long commute. For that particular class assignment, I chose to write about Persephone. I wrote about how, when the seasons changed, I would return to the darkness of the Pacific Northwest and the rainforest, then - when they changed again, I would be free to come home to myself and my education. As the year turned, circumstance removed my from my home, plunged me into darkness and then, in due time, allowed me to return to my home again - but never forever. Of course, I knew Persephone was longing to return to the home where her mother lived and where her house and goods were stored. My mother, my family and my material possessions were all in Victoria. I knew her Persephone’s husband had abducted her and taken her to live far away from anything familiar but to me, so in that way, we were more a mirror than a parallel but for me, having to leave my independent life and go back to the life of material privilege, family, old friends and familiar places all rooted in that dark, wet, grey and green setting, was like having to return to the underworld. This was so because in Victoria, I was not respected for my intellect. I was not a writer but rather the eccentric partner of a man from the old boy network. I was an active volunteer at the local contemporary gallery, a singer in a chamber choir, a shopper, a patron of the nicer restaurants in town, my mother’s driver, my sister’s babysitter, my friend’s confident. I could walk along the ocean and drive my car up island to see the forests, but I could not be myself. I was a dilettante, not a whole person - I felt like I had my whole family and all their expectations, (which were mostly negative) strapped to my back. In my senior year of college, I left for school as usual but when the summer came, I looked at the horizon and said no. I never went back, I abandoned my belongings, said goodbye to the man and started over. The spell had been broken and, beginning a life I could lead myself, as myself, I was “home.” It didn’t matter that I had nothing to my name and nobody who had known me for more than a few years, half-time. It didn’t matter that I was poor and would need to struggle to make a living for the next ten years, (Even though, I admit, it was much worse than I anticipated, I expected it and chose the path deliberately.) What mattered was I was fully able to be my whole self and not the parcel of expectations and stereotypical roles doled out to me in my “home town.” Despite the fact that I grew up there, Victoria had always felt like a place to which I had been carried off against my will, abducted into the darkness of a long, rain forest winter with no snow and no sun, entirely without my consent. To some degree it was true, my family moved to Victoria when I was ten years old. We moved from the East, Fredericton and then Montreal, where it snows in winter and the sun reflects off the snow turning everything blue, white and gold and where it is hot in the summer, which rarely happens in Victoria. But the people were different in both places as well. Somber and soft spoken in the west, they were serene on the surface but chilly underneath. Compared to the outspoken warmth (for good or ill) in the east, it was alienating to be amongst them. I was never quiet enough, never discreet enough, never unruffled enough about anything to really fit in. People I knew, thinking they were helping me, applied a slow and steady pressure, trying to get me to be quieter, more acquiescent, more accepting of life as it was and less likely to make waves. They were crushing the life out of me. What I found in Ottawa was the edge of myself. Foolishly, I became attached to a man who had similar traits to those of Victorians and spent the next seven years working that out. In part, at the time, I had the words of a friend in Victoria ringing in my head. She told me, whatever I had done, whatever I felt I had done wrong or whomever I had hurt, it would take me an equal number of years of my life to get over it - to repay it. I went from one bad spouse to the other, the latter in the throes of a serious chronic disease, and cared for him until my penance was done. At the end of that time, I began living a life of my own. The money still wasn’t there but if I paid careful attention to the details, lived very frugally and made use of all my resources, I found I could make a modest living as a writer and travel for part of the year, every year. I allowed myself to like what I liked, to do what I wanted to do and just to breathe. It felt like someone had removed tight iron bands from around my body. Then there was Austin. I found a place I thought could be the home of my heart and began another Persephone cycle. Thank goodness for a bad lover. Had the man I thought I cared for in Austin, turned out to be true, I would still be living Persephone’s story. As it was, Austin was a lovely place where I was miserably unhappy in my personal life. It could have been worked out, like so many Canadians, I might have become a snowbird, spending half the year in Canada and half in Texas but I thought my heart was broken and spent the latter quarter of 2011 figuring out what I could do to mend it. My friends advised flirtation. All of them did. I immersed myself in Ottawa, determined to make the city work for me, and flirted online. I restricted myself to men from Ottawa or Austin (so I wouldn’t feel so heartbroken at the loss) but, life intervened, as it so often does, and I found myself talking to a man from Massachusetts. At first, I assumed I could control the situation. After all, it might be nice to have a short-term relationship with someone who was at least within driving distance. We exchanged hundreds of emails. We spent time on the phone, we planned a visit. It was pleasant and I felt fairly certain it would consolidate the life I had planned, as planned. I thought I could manage it under my own terms. I thought it would be a light affair, something fun while I was working things out. I looked forward to visits and letters and romantic weekends. I thought I could keep it casual. Four months later, I knew I needed to spend the rest of my life with this man, I agonized over what to do, thinking it unlikely that he felt the same way. Seven months later, in the town where he lives, we wed. Just a few weeks ago, I was looking out the window toward some of the hills in the Berkshires and thinking about how unfamiliar the place still feels on many levels. The weather is different. All of my things are still in storage. There are plenty of adjustments to be made. I looked at the sun coming over the mountains and tried to take it in as home. It didn’t really settle. I love our loft and now, this morning, when I look out the window at the cloud and the rain settling in for the day, I see the ordinariness that has become my home, I have been gone long enough now that anything else is unfamiliar. Home, for me, is rooted in the man sleeping in the bedroom, waiting for me to awaken him to another day. Home is his smile in the morning. It is our conversations in the car. Home is dinner cooked for both of us together. In the feeling of his arms around me, the scent of his shirts, the way he takes my hand right before we eat dinner every night and says something sweet - without fail. Home is the two of us, alone. My marriage has changed and deepened my definition of home. Home is where I am loved for myself and left as myself. He makes no effort to change me. Home is where he understands my needs and struggles without my saying so, it is our marriage bed, it is our kitchen, it is moving the furniture and shopping for a washer and dryer, it is the perfunctory phone call and people from the community invited over for tea. And I ask myself, “would I be as happy with him if we were in Victoria?” I cannot imagine I would, but that is only partly based on location. He and I would never choose to live on an island with no way off. He could not live the life demanded of him there any more than I could. Then again, it doesn’t have to be here. I would be with him anywhere he truly wanted to be. We would arrive, I would look around me and I would begin the process of making “home” because of course, as long as he is there, it would be home. It would be an adventure and welcome because it is the two of us together. It is always the two of us together, seeing the world as it turns. I am astonished at how deep the connection has become, I am grateful every day for this union of souls and more grateful for how interesting he is, how everything about him is deep and rich and new to me in so many ways and yet entirely familiar, exactly as it should be. He is everything I hoped for in a mate and those things I had forgotten to hope for but always wanted anyway? He is all of them too. Geography is dependent on him. The world is home, as long as he is in it.