Transition

One week ago Shirley and I pulled into the driveway at my parent's North Vancouver house after five hours on the road, her red pickup truck and my RAV4 packed to the rafters with my things. One week ago I left Gold Bridge on the start of an adventure with an unknown destination, full of emotion and excitement. Some more tears as we made the trip over the dusty Hurley, periodically stopping to check on the load as it was jostled by the rough ruts in the logging road.

We unpacked as hurriedly as possible so that she could turn around to get home again, and I spent the next days sorting through all that I have amassed while taking breaks to participate in some writing, reading, playing the guitar.

I sit here this evening in the dimming summer light with the house to myself as the dishwasher hums away. Robins and chickadees belt out their songs from the backyard bramble of bushes and forest, and a plane flies high overhead. It seems like there is always a plane. Always something flying through the city soundscape whenever I take a moment to pause and listen. The days are awash with the sounds of human activity, the sounds of a mechanized life. It's amazing how sensitive I have become to the noise of this place after finally adjusting to the quiet of such a small town. The quiet which at first seemed so empty and forlorn. I miss the river meeting my ears from the throat of the valley, but I know it will still be there when I return to visit.

Thankfully my parents have been away during this stay here, and so I was able to leave streams of boxes lining the hallways in wait for even more sorting and culling: what will I need access to over the next year? what can be permanently stored until I find a new home? what can I give away?

I've tried to fold my items as neatly as possible into a house already filled up with things. Tucking boxes into the corners of the storage room, sliding clothes into the inches of available closet space in my old bedroom, sparingly spreading a few things into a couple of vacant drawers. I want to make it easy for my parents to have my things here, because otherwise it'll be a storage locker. I am thankful to have this place to come back to, the place of my childhood. I will be able to do a load of laundry in between jaunts around the province, to have a few square meals with some denomination of my family, and switching out seasonal sporting gear before heading back out onto the road again.

I had a bit of culture shock in my first few days here, which surprised me at first, but in retrospect should have been expected after living for years in the type of environment I was immersed in. This place seemed tinged with a golden glow. New, exciting, different, full of green, clean, well-manicured streets. The cars so clean I could see my reflection in them. Nothing out of place.

After sorting and storing and boxing and labeling all day I spent the long evening hours just walking around, picking my way over my old routes to school, noticing where shortcuts had grown over into a dense tangle of forest, noticing the difference in coastal and interior vegetation. I strolled past where friends used to live, staring into people's open windows and doors, getting a peek at their lives, at their homes. I'm fascinated by it all.

I have been going to the forest often as well to walk and keep the connection to the wild growth of nature, escaping for brief interludes from a view completely made up of landscaping and pavement. And today it seems to have settled in more deeply that right now I don't have a place that is my home, but I do have this place to live and to come back to pause, and for that I am incredibly thankful. And perhaps in this search I will find that the feeling of home is something I carry within me. That if I take the time to look deeply within the walls of my soul I will find it housed there, just as radiant as the summer sunlight streaming through the branches of a forest canopy.