I was in Ottawa for Canada Day, at the House where my parents have lived since I was eighteen months old.  I reportedly welcomed myself to this house by making myself comfortable in the bottom kitchen drawer while my mother unpacked boxes around me, and I grew up here.

This house holds the first 24 years of my life in its walls and on its grounds.  I lost all my teeth here; came home blissed out after a perfect first kiss at sunset at a park a few blocks away; slammed the door to my room so often as a teenager that my Father once threatened to take my door off altogether if I didn’t stop.  I tumbled off Greyhound buses and Via trains during university, dumping my suitcases and my troubles in the front hall, retreating back into the feelings of safety that familiarity can bring.  I brought the man I would marry here for the first time at Christmas in December of 2001, sharing our twinkling lights and cozy holiday traditions with him.  I had wedding pictures taken under the huge tree in the backyard.  I flew home newly pregnant and nauseous, to my mother who waiting at the bottom of the escalator with open arms and Fruit 2 Go, which got me through that first trimester when everything and nothing at all turned my stomach, all the time.

I also struggled here, mightily, broken-hearted over romantic relationships that never seemed to last, throwing myself in a despondent heap to cry rivers of tears into my favourite pink pillowcase.  I lost friendships here, illusions about myself and the world here, had terrible battles with both my parents that none of us will ever forget.  I waited, one brilliantly sunny morning in December 1998, for word about my grandmother from my parents.  The hospital had called to say that her vitals were “funny” and they should go.  They would call, they said, to tell us if she was alright, or come back if she wasn’t.  I woke my brother up and made him get into my parents’ empty bed with me, snuggling beside him as he fell back to sleep, despite the fact that we were 12 and 19.  The call wouldn’t come, and I knew it, and I wondered how this house and this life and his world would change when my father arrived shortly, which he did, to tell me that our grandmother had died.  I slunk back here in March of 1999, leaving my first year of university a month early, a heaping mess of newly diagnosed major depressive disorder and undergraduate angst.

My home is my history, my past.  For all the tribulations that I remember, there was always comfort here too.  Happiness and safety, and above all, no matter what, love.  But home felt different, being back in it with the new steadiness of proper medication and a healing brain.  It felt simpler, less fraught, quieter.  The phone and doorbell seemed to ring less, the wind through the trees to be more audible.  I noticed the gardens my parents tend to so carefully, the quaint domestic touches my artistic mother places everywhere around the house, the vast array of fiction and nonfiction books lining shelves in the bedrooms and basement.  I found little moments, in the incredibly busy schedule of extended family events, to haul strawberries with my mother and drive to Dairy Queen with my father.   I realized that my brother, who so often seemed so troublesome and difficult to connect with, is just a person too, wanting harmony and a good relationship with me, which is probably all he has ever wanted, even if I couldn’t see it.

I like this new version of home.  I carry it with me, remembering it now as I am back in my own and forever home.  I am Glad it felt the same, in the old and most important ways.  But I am glad, very, very glad, that it felt different, too.