Home, or Something Like It

The grandfather clock is running on time, for once.

“We had it looked at,” my mother declares proudly. “By a very nice man. Now, it never runs fast anymore.”

As the clock chimes loudly through the house, on the hour, as I have never known it to do, I wander into my bedroom. Or, what was once my bedroom – now, perhaps, more so a room that stores my belongings while I am elsewhere. A room that my mother uses as overflow as she, in her words, “tidies up”. If you ask me, she’s just moving things from one room to another but I shan’t tell her that. I nudge the box of old Finnish magazines further under my bed with one toe and look around.

I hadn’t expected to be here right now. Just recently, I wrote of not feeling quite ready to travel, not even so far as to see my family. But events took a course of their own and I had no choice but to return, at least to spend some time with my parents and help out around the house for a little while. So, I wrapped up what I could in Toronto, agreed my new remote working locale with my office, and packed up my home to go…

Home?

Perhaps home is too strong a word. I moved out of my parents’ house almost nine years ago. Perhaps, now, it is just a place I once lived. Yet its familiarity does not wane, my body moving on autopilot from room to room without thought. My mother fusses as I start to cook, pointing out where to find pots and pans.

“Yes, Mum,” I respond with exasperation. She is supposed to be resting following a surprise surgery but I can’t seem to get her to sit down. “I know where everything is.”

“I suppose you do,” she says doubtfully. She casts me one last glance, throws her hands above her head, and leaves me to it.

When I pack up to leave the house to visit other family and friends, she hands me the visitor’s book. It is a long-standing tradition in our house, a hard-backed book that she whips out menacingly at the end of every social gathering, thrust into the faces of dinner guests and passersby alike. But not at me. Not at someone who lives there.

Lived. Who lived there.

Perhaps no longer home, if I’m made to sign the visitor’s book… I write slowly.

The towering bookshelves behind me watch as I struggle over what to write next. Home is not in the walls of this house that I have long since left, however familiar it is to me. Home is in the people sitting close by, my parents in their usual seats by the window with cups of coffee in hand. Dad is thumbing through the road map for our route south. Mum is watching me write.

Wherever they are, I will always have a home.

I close the book and hand it back. My mother, impatient as ever, reads through it with a small smile on her face.

If I don’t feel the visitor with my parents, I do by the time I reach Edinburgh. The last time I’d been there, two years before, I had felt wildly out of place. Somewhere that I had called home not so long ago suddenly felt unfamiliar and unwelcoming, like I no longer belonged. This feeling didn’t return on this visit. Instead, I felt as though I was greeting an old friend, traversing winding streets and cresting cobbled hills, but all in the knowledge that this was no longer my place. This was just a place I came to.

Last time, it had still been too fresh. Last time, I had barely found my feet in Toronto properly before I was returning to Edinburgh for a summer contract, torn between the past and the present and a future I could not yet see. Now, I know where I’m coming from. And I know where I’ll be returning to.

I’ve never believed Toronto to be my forever home. It’s home for now and it’ll be home for at least a few more years. But I couldn’t imagine being away from Europe for the rest of my life, so far from family.

Even then, even for all the home that this country has been, I couldn’t imagine myself returning to the UK. It was already a place I couldn’t fully understand anymore when I left – this, in large part, why I left – and things have not improved in the time I have been gone. Other members of my family have been feeling similarly.

Slowly, our viking roots seem to be pulling many of us back towards the Nordic countries. My parents toy with the idea of moving to Finland, something I wholeheartedly support. My brother mentions Sweden. Wherever I end up, I know it will be closer to them.

And, as ever, close to the water. The one commonality between all of the many places I have felt at home, is that they have been on or near the water. I am too young to remember much of living in Manchester and I never settled in the few months I lived in London. I grew up against the harsh winds of the North Sea and spent summers by the cool kiss of the Finnish lake. Now, Lake Ontario lies not so far from my house, the breeze carrying me downtown to the water’s edge.

My viking roots draw me to the water, too, I’m sure – my ancestors that travelled the waterways from the north. Perhaps, that is all that home really comes down to, after all. Where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’m going.