Being At Home

I’m in Vancouver for a few days visiting Elizabeth and Billie. Once these guys get up and going E and I are driving down to Anacortes, Washington to visit a gal whom I haven’t seen since we were about 20 years old. Despite all those years and all that space between us, the affection that we felt toward each other during the relatively brief period that we lived close to one another, has endured. I look forward to seeing her.

Last Tuesday I attended the first of a series of gatherings of a memoir writing group, a “class” offered by the Academy of Life Long Learning at U of Toronto. All of the teachers or facilitators of the Academy’s offerings are volunteers and the classes are not for credit (in the academic sense). Rather they fulfil the desires of the participants for intellectual and social connection and stimulation. All of the roughly twenty-five people present for this course, including the facilitators, are about my age – i.e., retired folks (as they say in the US). The first hour was spent hearing about the format of the course and in introducing ourselves briefly – name and reason for joining the group or what we wished to derive from it, followed by a tea break. In the second hour we were given an eight minute period of writing from the prompt: something that used to be but is no longer. I wrote about the steel tub in which my grandmother washed bedding and clothing for eight children and a host of employees who bunked at the farm to help in the lumber mill. Each person read his or her brief piece. So many of these brought old memories to us all; there was much humour and delight in the sharing.

The group will meet every second Tuesday morning for the full academic year. Because I will be away from mid-November until the end of April, I will only be there for five of the sessions. I explained this to one of the facilitators by phone a month or so ago when I was deciding whether or not to even begin. She was most encouraging despite my situation, so based on my conversation with her, I decided to go. I’m very glad that I did. Over half of the group has been a part of this little writing community more than once. I quickly felt at home and at ease with the entire group and with the facilitators: all were welcoming and friendly and the brief readings that we did were varied and interesting. We have been given an “assignment,” to write a brief piece on “home.” So I sit here in my daughter’s living room on the west coast, still in Toronto time (9:42 AM) as she and my granddaughter snooze on in Pacific time (6:43 AM), thinking about home and what that term means to me.

While still lying in my made-up bed earlier, I did a rough calculation about the number of places I have called home. At last counting I would say there have been 39 moves. As a kid with my family I lived in eight different homes – two in Belleville, one in Brockville, three in Ottawa, and two, briefly in Toronto. As a young adult – 19-35 there were 13 different places, mainly in Toronto’s Annex area. Since there have been 18. When I add it up it looks like my life has been terribly fragmented and chaotic though I haven’t experienced it that way. Each move happened for particular reasons that are clear to me and that had meaning at the time. Because of this multiplication of residences I have no enduring sense of location over long periods as would someone who has essentially lived for a long time in one house and one city. The multiplicity has given me something else, however: I am able to pinpoint with fairly reliable accuracy the periods in which various things happened and the reactions that I had to them. I am in a stage of my life in which I look over the past as I have experienced it. I find myself able mentally to as it were “walk into” one of the places where I have lived at another period, to walk about there connecting with those others with whom I shared that space and time, to recall not just specific events, but even the feelings that I experienced during and after them, as well as the ways that I dealt with those feelings and experiences given the capacity I had at that period to process, to understand, and to articulate to myself or to others what was happening.

There is another dimension to the meaning of home that is important to me: it relates to what we mean when we say we feel “at home.” Learning to feel at home with myself and with others has definitely been a life-long learning process and not an easy or painless one. To feel at home, at ease, one must feel safe. Reaching the place of relative safety that I experience at this stage of my life has been hard won. It has been facilitated by many people and experiences. One important experience of this kind over the past six or seven years has been my involvement in a writing group with six other women whom I have known for decades. It was there that I especially have found my own voice. Discovering over time through trial and error, sometimes through writing out or talking out my feelings with these women, I have come to a sense of much greater freedom about expressing whatever is there within me to express, without (at least so far as I’m aware!) editing myself out of a fear of censure, attack, or rejection. When I came to the first session of this Academy writing group, I quickly felt “at home,” at ease, and safe. That I was able to do so is the result of the work I have done but also because of the tenor of the group set by the facilitators and the other participants. Like me,  those present appear to want an environment that is accepting and safe, where judgement and competition, such large components of our earlier lives, can be set aside. Few things in life are as sweet as the sense that you can be the whole of yourself, truly “at home” with others.