Every July after my 9-year-old was born, I took my family of three back to my hometown of Montreal for a few months. Last summer, we hadn’t been home since she was 6 (pandemic, etc.), but soon we were back in our old rhythms (long dinners with my parents, hanging out with my eldest friend. endless coffee dates, summer camps in French) and a new rhythm. Let Noah do more on his own than in LA where we live. She would cross the street looking for croissants, go to the stationery store to browse, and walk alone to my parents’ apartment.
One night, near 10pm, on my way home from another dinner in the familyShe wanted to play in the park across from our rented house.
of courseI said, and she slipped down at night to climb the jungle gym.
I took out the compost from the basement door. Tuesday: Compost. Wednesday: Recycle. Friday: Garbage. working city. joint agreement. Curb pile. It was very quiet outside, very calm. i could live like this,I thought.
It took a little too long for Noah to come back. I panicked and yelled from the front door for her to come back. Here we come! she screamed back. nothing happened. My heart flew away in a moment of terror. she was completely safe. She walked in the door and I sent her to the shower, thinking about how many lives one person can choose.
***
Like many of us, questions about home ring louder during the summer and after Christmas. where did i come from). Parts of me belong most comfortably in Montreal, be it the two languages, the accents, the country itself, but I feel an uncomfortable level of dissonance every time I return home.
For years and decades, really, everything was claustrophobic, the faces, the parties, the stories, everything was all too familiar. region We all told each other as we left for New York, London, Berlin and Johannesburg. Rush in a place. A place where our city can grow beyond what it can hold or witness.
After college, I imagined myself to be nowhere but New York. During her 12 years there, that vision never wavered. Its homeliness, its correctness were not questioned. That feeling didn’t change when I moved with her husband to Vienna, Austria when she was 34. I saw my life abroad as a kind of strange interlude rather than the truth itself.It took me years to calm down and accept the truth — my genuine article Life was so good, not the imaginary thing I left behind.
Last summer, I returned to New York City for the first time in five years, and although there was an old life there, on the same street, I didn’t feel at home. I had the greatest period of adulthood. Peering into a dilapidated apartment with my best friend felt like the old days. A friend of that era saw a picture of me outside that door and he saw a picture of me with nothing but a tote bag on his shoulder for nine of her twelve years living there. rice field. We rushed back to our miserable, jolly 20s and early 30s, when we had bags on our backs and the imaginary weight of the world on our shoulders. Who were those people? what were they chasing?
***
Every time I return to Montreal (or New York City now), I realize how far my life has come from the city of my childhood and youth. I say no hint of snobbery or disrespect.I spend most of my time on our wishes Did it Living in Montreal: After grappling with LA traffic and highways, weekly US shootings, and sexual and reproductive disenfranchisement, the simplicity of it all feels surprisingly easy and sane. Canada’s pace is slow and calm. Summer is very green.people sit terrace and eat and drink. A friend once said, Montreal has a lot of type B people, and I find this interesting and maybe true? And why did the 18 year old me desperately want to leave?
what am i getting here? Perhaps it’s that “home” has come to feel like a fragmented reality. Nothing is more substantial than the rest.
This is where it should default to sappy. home is where the heart isAlso home is everywhere [cue: husband, daughter] that is, a roaming (roving?) entity. But that’s not what I’m looking for.
Yes, Montreal will always be my hometown. That frigid winter and terrible drivers and franglish are in my bones. But if I’m talking about self now, place, and I don’t want to fall back on the idea of family as home. Can I accept that I will never find The One Place that feels absolutely right again? Where is my most complete, complete, integrated self? mosquito?
Do daughters who barely know each other play together like sisters in the park since childhood, drinking wine with older girlfriends in the house? Sitting on the beach in Los Angeles with friends you feel a deep soul connection with, and you only know the version? How about strolling down Smith Street in Brooklyn with a coffee in hand and a tote bag slung over your shoulder? Bus 13 in Vienna, F train in Brooklyn, Atwater station in Montreal? Does the house have to be all of it?
how about you Do you have one or more places you can call home?
Abigail Rasminsky Writer, editor and teacher based in Los Angeles but currently living in Cambridge, England. She teaches creative writing at her Keck School of Medicine at USC and writes a weekly newsletter. person + bodyShe also writes for Cup of Jo on beauty, marriage, teenage years, loss and an only child.
PS Home as a refuge, and where would you like to raise your children?
(Photo by Kristin Weilert/Stocksey.)
