Homecoming

Every year it's seems like my visits home to Canada get fewer and further. I love spending time with my family, but we most often meet at the lake in Montana. It is fun and alluring and "home" gets neglected. I have friends who have moved far away that get the shakes about going home, and others that love it. It is always a mixed bag for me. I seem to have grown up in spite of myself, but when I go home I can never keep track of how old I am. It is only in Lethbridge that I am catapulted backwards. I am suddenly a tangle of emotions. I am brash and brave as I jump off a bridge into murky irrigation waters. I am in the throws of my first broken heart. I am running wild with ranch grown boys long after the hour that my parents would like me home in bed. Time is no longer linear but fluid and tricky. It is so hard for me to get a grip on time there that I stare hard at the faces I pass by at the store, trying to get a glimpse of myself. Is she older or younger, do I have wrinkles like that or not yet? Please not yet. As my husband laughs and laments I can't walk five feet in the mall without running into someone I know. These are my people, not the faceless crowd I am used to in Salt Lake. After ten years they are as much strangers as kin. Coming home is usually comforting and disconcerting all at the same time (if that is even possible).

When I feel myself lost in time, as I do there, my capacity to embrace change is challenged. I find comfort in the vast surroundings of Lethbridge that never seem to change. Miles and miles of precious ranch and farmland, made more romantic by tales of ancestors who lived on it, worked it, and loved it. My heart fills and I wax poetic- be forewarned. Driving through the mountains and down out of the foothills the prairie unfolds and then breaks open into unspoiled vistas that can shatter the ceiling of your imagination.

Visiting Waterton on my trip home felt like coming back to an old love. I apologize sweet Waterton for cheating on you with Montana and Glacier park. ( you know you've always been my one true love!). Standing with my toes in the lake there I think for a minute I can almost glimpse eternity. Isn't the trickiest thing about this life being born with eternity in your heart and a ticking clock around your neck? We are forced to live within the confines of time while thirsting after immortality. For me, it is there, the two can almost meet up for a moment. As I watch my daughter throwing rocks in the lake, rippling ceaselessly outward, I don't mind that my handle on time is not the firm grip I once believed it to be.

I realize that going home gives me a chance to be all pieces of myself at once. Daughter, grandchild, sister, mother, adult. All the time changing, all the time staying the same. As I drive back south to a crowded city where everyone is always in a hurry, I have the wind in my hair and a song in my heart. I am thankful for the place I still call home.