You know that heart-pull feeling of nostalgia you get when you think about your childhood home? Or the deep stare you cast its way if you happen to be able to drive by it? I recently had the chance to step right inside my mom’s childhood home and I found myself absorbed in every room, imagining her as a young child and teenager in that very place.
To be clear, the home is still in our family, so it’s not as otherworldly as I might be making it sound. And it’s not far away – just on the outskirts of Calgary now. My grandparents built the homestead when they bought the land in the 1920s, and then the generations of my uncle and then my cousin and their families came to live there as time evolved. I loved visiting The Farm as a kid and it seemed such a long drive from our northwest Calgary home that we used to pack snacks for the journey. Now the city has all but swallowed it up.
But my cousin and now his grown daughter and her children still farm there, in homes that didn’t exist until a few years ago. The old homestead has changed in the 40 years since I last stepped inside. But the living room, save for the furniture, was unchanged. I gazed out the large picture window that she would have looked out, my mom, when the farm was still so removed from the city that she had to move into Calgary for high school. That big mansion way down on the neighbouring farm is new, but I could sense those long-ago impressions of the rural life that she had.
She didn’t talk about her growing up years very much and then passed before I knew the questions that I should ask. But I knew the place was special to her, just like her own mom’s childhood home was before her. Grandma wrote about her own childhood home in her sister’s autograph book over a century ago:
Okotoks Dec 28, 1915:
My dear sister,
In the love for your new and dear friends, don’t forget the old ones. They are best. Remember the white house by the roadside that we call ‘home’.
Lovingly yours always,
Dora
There you have it – there really is no place like home!