Canada Thoughts

My mind always turns back to Canada around the beginning of October, so none of this should be surprising. Nearly every year I lived in LA, I made sure to go back to BC for Canadian Thanksgiving (the second Monday in October), so as soon as there's a chill in the wind and the leaves go whispery, I get that migratory tingle. Like a goose.

Canada has been on my mind a lot lately; whether this is brought on by that raft of CBC-listening I did a couple weeks ago, or if that was sparked by some subconscious rumbling, I don't know. I am feeling its pull, though, in a way I never expected to do here. Is it a case of finally getting comfortable and so opening up to uncertainty? Or simply 'the grass is always greener'...? Given that coastal BC is a temperate rainforest, the grass is greener there than in lots of places – but that's beside the point.

I absolutely adore Cambridge. I have never felt so at home anywhere. I tell anyone I talk to for more than ten minutes that I would marry Cambridge if I could. We've got a good thing going on, and I feel a little bit dirty even to consider the possibility of leaving, but ... I do. It would help if I had any confidence in the likelihood of my being allowed to stay – when the political atmosphere grows daily darker as far as immigration is concerned, one is not tempted to trust in the mercy of those who hold one's visa renewal in their hands, or be tempted to put down roots of any serious kind. It might also help if I had much experience with staying put – I don't think I've lived at one address for more than three years since college, and life has conditioned me to start wondering 'what next?' as soon as I start to settle in somewhere.

But I can't help wondering if there's more to it than that. I am acutely aware that I am a willing part of Canada's brain drain, and I don't like that. While it's perversely in-character for Canada to play The Giving Tree, it's a brilliant country and deserves to shine, and I'd like to contribute to that shine, if I could. I've been away as long as I lived there, now, but I still identify with its values and still operate under its cultural conditioning, for better or worse. Having been through rather a dark period in the last ten years, Canada has exploded back into being itself, harder than before, and this is exciting. The ramp-up to the sesquicentennial next year is only adding to that. It's a good time to be Canadian, and I'm all the way over here.

Now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their children are off on a Canadian visit, and visiting BC at that. It'll be all over the British news for the next bit, and I'll be seeing the early-October face of BC which was the only face I saw for so many years. Cue those comfortingly familiar homesickness pangs.

Then I start wondering where I'd want to live if I moved back, do Google Street View virtual tours of places I hold in some haze of fantasy, and see that the streets are too wide and the houses too far apart and how does anyone live like this? There are no trains. Too many straight lines. It gets hot in the summer and it's a long long way from anywhere to anywhere.

I came here for a reason, and for the next couple years at least I need to focus on that, so that if I am sent back at the end of it, I will at least have made the most of my time. It is good, in some small way, to know there is a part of me that is ready to go home, so that if it does happen and I spend the rest of my days pining for Cambridge, I'll know where to pin the blame.

In the meantime, I really must find a copy of I Heard The Owl Call My Name ...

"Stan Rogers - Northwest Passage" (Watch on YouTube)