117th Ave

What is it about the nostaglia of a place that has the power to grip a heart so heavily? Is it because I was just a litte girl when my world was uprooted, when life asked me to refind footing, to adapt?

I was so scared in those days. We arrive to our new home down South on August 3, 2000. Barrington Avenue. The world shifted incredibly for all of us, my parents bold in their attempt to show us life outside of the only kind we had ever known. My parents, some of the first in our family to move so far away from the home and land our great-grandparents imigrated to settle.

They were ready to fly and took us along. For that I am grateful. Because despite the difficulty in going back now as an adult, despite how those raw emotions so easily flow, I cannot imagine what would have been had we remained had we stayed. And isn't that the cliche. Isn't that how it is for all of the decisions we make; "I cannot imagine if..."

Last Thursday morning I went back to the home I spent the first 13 years of my life. I walked the land, saw the garden my mom tended to the night her water broke when pregnant with me, the garden we harvested for years. I revisited the fort James and I built. Of course it is cleared out now, a small space of a grove amidst the elms. Standing along the line of lilac bushes I observed the Pederson's farmland. The emotions were there, but it was reaching out and holding the crab apple tree branches that brought the tears. Of all things! And I keep asking myself, "Why is this so emotional? Why is it so hard?"

It is multidimensional, but maybe it is mostly because of how distant childhood is from me now, and how easily I feel small again when I stand in that tract of land off the Kathryn Road in Valley City. Because memories stand frozen there and so is the ideal of the state of my heart, so pure in its innocence, so trusting that the world would give me my greatest dreams. How I long to return to that blind faith full of joy and contentment. And perhaps that is why I cry. Perhaps that is why I return.