The Geography Of Home

We live in a spectacular place. Whenever I express (regularly) my awe and breathless wonder (“we live in a such beautiful place”) to my family, my enthusiasm is met with indifference and more often by impatient let’s just get going-ness.

In the morning you can go for a walk in old-growth forest, in the afternoon you can hit the beach, or go fit in a few ski runs on the local mountains during the winter. We pay a price in rain, but mostly, I look around and catch my breath. There are mountains, vistas, eagles, and, should you tire of those, there are also fancy glass towers and cafes that serve coffee as an art form.

My own childhood city was beautiful in its own ways -  an older, elegant city, with stone and brick houses settled onto and around a gentle mountain by a wide river – but I failed to appreciate its charms even as I grew up in its embrace.

It is only now, as an adult that I look back and understand that my internal preferences for stone houses and crisp winter light were shaped by my external surroundings, influences I absorbed even as I hated the cold and took no notice of grey stone. I think that part of why I am in awe of my surroundings now is that they are so different from those of my earliest sensory impressions.

We all carry around a personal, sensory geography. A emotional landscape which, whenever we encounter recognizable aspects of this internal scenery, gives us a sense of home even if we are years and miles away from the place we once called ours.

Smells are of course, one powerful manifestation of this idea. Cedar, smoke, hot concrete, cut grass after rain, all evoke different memory responses in different people. So too, landscapes carve themselves into our memory. To find yourself on a road you have not traveled for years, may no longer even realize you once knew, but suddenly come across that bend or churchyard or stand of trees is to be transported through time.  

I do not know what aspect of this magnificent place will impress itself forever into my daughter’s internal landscape, but I know for sure that even though she is accustomed to the everyday splendor around her, one day, a tunnel of trees, a rainy afternoon, the diamond sharp reflection of light on water will chime deep inside her and resonate home.

EarnestGirl lives, writes, and bores her family in Vancouver, BC.  She  also chronicles life on the West Coast at YummyMummyClub.

Photo is courtesy of the author's daughter.