Canada, eh?
I recently made a trip back home to Calgary.
In the last several years, Paul and I have made the road trip from Texas to Calgary preferring the scenic route and taking different routes covering the roughly 2000-mile trip to Alberta. We’ve gone up the west coast to Victoria, straight up through Montana, and even taken the easterly route through Manitoba.
But this time I flew. It’s been a while since I have taken a plane anywhere and let me tell you, I’m still not impressed. Seems like the airline folks, like the supermarket folks, want us to do the work they used to do while they supervise us. (I don’t remember being hired as an employee of any of these businesses, and I think we should get an employees’ discount for doing the work that they used to do.) The airport shuffle, plane delays, gate changes, TSA checks, customs and immigration notwithstanding, I made the trip in relatively decent flying time but did not get to the Calgary airport until close to 1:00 in the morning. If you must travel by air, I think going later at night is best because when you get to the arrival airport, seriously, there’s hardly anybody there and there are no crowds battling you at the baggage carousel or getting in front of you at the taxi stand.
One of the things that was most welcoming, however, was the big Canada sign I found on the other side of customs. And once I passed that bright lit-up Canadian sign, I saw this beautiful sculpture of these horses. I don’t know a lot about art, but I sure liked this sculpture. It reminded me of the ruggedness that Calgary and Calgarians relate to (well, at least used to relate to in the past that I grew up in.) But Calgary simply isn’t that rugged anymore. It has grown up a lot since I lived there thirty-odd years ago, shaking off its cowboy culture and oil rig ruggedness. It’s really quite a cosmopolitan city now and it subsequently feels less like home each time I visit.
But I wasn’t there for the restaurants, or the mountains, or the scenery this time. I really went to visit with my 92-year-old mother and have little mom-and-daughter time. I rented a car so that we could go out on errands or to restaurants and old haunts, and through the old neighborhoods we lived in when our family was young.
I got my fill of Poutine, Salt and Pepper Squid and Ginger Beef, A&W’s teen burger and frosty root beer, a # 14 extra-special pizza at the neighborhood pub, and of course a trip to Tim Horton’s for coffee and Timbits. 
I caught the scent of the sweet prairie grasses on the winds on Nose Hill, saw Turtle Rock, and enjoyed the summer-time daylight until 10:15 pm. Mom and I reminisced about the friends that used to visit us on birthdays and Christmas, and the fun we had playing baseball scrub in the corner field, but it is now filled with multi-family units. We admired my arbor-day tree in her back yard that I planted with my dad when I was eight years old. It is now a towering, majestic blue-spruce boasting sixty-one years of healthy growth and provides a home to many birds, and branches for many nests.
It’s nice to go home and remember where we come from. To plant our feet where we used to walk. To sleep in the same bed and in the same rooms I grew up in. To look through old photo albums and leaf through old diaries and autograph books that still find a place in my mother’s cedar chest in the basement. I have two childhood friends there who are woven inextricably into my heart and are part of the air I breathe from my past.
But the other side of that comfort is knowing I don’t belong there anymore, but I know I am welcome each time I visit.
Knowing that my home is here in Texas, here with my husband and my Boxers, here with my small group of friends who seem like they have been with me all of my life. Here in the heat and humidity and thunderstorms and occasional tornado warnings. Here where barbecue is a meal not a cooking apparatus. Here where the saying goes, I wasn’t born here but I got here as fast as I could. Here where y’all and fixin’ to is probably the first southern vernacular this transplanted Canadian picked up thirty years ago.
Maybe I am luckier than most. I can go home twice.