There's no place like home

I'm homeless. Not unhoused, and this house, our first and so far only house, is definitely a home. And the place where the house is located, a small city near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is very nice and as close to a home as I've had, certainly the place where I've lived the longest. But it's not Home.

I was born in the United States, and I spent the first 40 years of my life there. My family lived in two small towns in New Hampshire and two in Massachusetts. With all that moving, there is no one place that I grew up. After my father died, my mom retired to a New Hampshire seacoast town that none of the family had ever lived in. So "home town" is an elusive concept for me.

My roots lie in French Canada and mostly in France before that. My ancestors seven and more generations back were almost all migrants, leaving Europe behind for what they called Nouvelle-France, a land they shared, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not, with Indigenous peoples.

In 1763, the settlers lost the dream of a new homeland when the British achieved military conquest, and the French crown abandoned them. The Conquest made them all, French and Indigenous alike, subjects of a foreign monarch. Sometimes I wish the settlers had all returned to France, as some did, even though that would mean I wouldn't be here.

(Despite feeling no love for les maudits anglais who subjugated my ancestors and were pretty awful colonists in general, I have a fondness for the English in England and the magnificent language of Shakespeare.)

Many generations after the Conquest, six of my great-grandparents and one grandfather uprooted themselves from the poverty of rural Quebec and went to the United States to seek better opportunities, even though those opportunities often began and sometimes ended with factory labour and all the hazards that entailed.

The "little Canada" where I was born was different that the rest of New Hampshire. New England history and American history were not my history. My parents had always let us know that we were "of French-Canadian extraction." More than my siblings, I always felt French-Canadian, and different. Even though I was a third-generation American and spoke no more than a smattering of French, I never felt assimilated. I have always sensed the loss of place and culture that happens with migration. From early on, I had a desire to move "back" to Canada.

The WASP-y historical Massachusetts town where we lived from when I was four until I finished Grade 8 was not really home. My mom could always blend, but my dad's family tends to have a ruddy complexion, and he stood out to some extent as a "visible minority." He was the high school principal. One day, one of the students, feeling disgruntled about something, told me to tell my dad that he was a frog. That incident is seared into my memory. I even remember where we were when he said that.

I have my mom's complexion and all the white privilege that goes along with that, but I resent having to check the "White" box on forms, and sometimes I don't. "White" started as English Protestant and then British-American Protestant, plus other "Nordic" Christians -- defintely not Catholics -- and that was broadened only very slowly and reluctantly. My people were not considered "white" when they arrived, any more than the Irish or Italians were.

We moved again before I went to high school. That town is nice, but I lived there for only four years plus two summers, so I never got rooted. Once again, it wasn't home.

I went to university in Boston, a place I love dearly. Boston is where I met Sweetie and where we both played in several original music bands. After that, it was where I worked in theatre for several years. I had thought Boston would be my home, but it never quite was. We couldn't afford to settle there, and after 20 years, we both felt restless. Sweetie wanted to go to graduate school. I wanted to go to a place where film and television acting was more of a thing. We both needed a new scene.

We considered relocating to Montreal. Curiously for a place far from the ocean, McGill University has a marine biology graduate program. But it would not have been the best place for either of us given what we wanted to do, so we ended up moving to the Left Coast, her to Seattle and me to Vancouver. I migrated across the same international boundary my forebears had crossed but in the opposite direction and several thousand kilometres to the west. Sweetie followed once she had finished school.

So there we were, in Canada. "Back" in Canada, for me. And yet...it was not the Canada I knew, which was basically Quebec. The bilingual Pierre Trudeau vision I grew up with never really existed. I remember visiting Ontario when I was a kid and thinking how different it was from Quebec. So British. A bit quaint. And I have learned that British Columbia is nothing like what I knew of Canada. English Canadians aren't all alike, but they have a lot of shared culture, and it's quite different from French Canadian culture. Despite being an anglophone in Canada, I will never be English Canadian.

I think about Quebec, and yet that could no longer be home either. Sweetie and I could both overcome the language barrier to an extent, but modern Quebec is not the same place as the province my forebears left. In the time since my family left, it has changed radically. As well, it's bloody cold in winter. Somehow, I did not inherit my ancestors' ability to thrive in cold weather.

I dream of France. I know I've been there only on vacation, and vacations aren't real life, but the comfort I feel there is surprising and delightful. Could the place most of my people left 400 years ago ever be home? I would love to find out.

Meanwhile, if home is where the heart is, then for now home is here, with my Sweetie. We know a lot of lovely people here. We're even speaking more French in the house! But Home might be a place that I will never find because, for me, it doesn't exist.