Leaving is very hard to do.
Leaving a community where I’ve spent almost half my life was extremely difficult. Leaving a house where we’d really enjoyed living for the last 14 years is also difficult. As I sat for one final time on the couch in the basement and, to be honest, had a little cry, my wife told me that we would always have the memories. However, like music and smells, memory is attached to places and by leaving places, we lose a bit of memory. Our eldest’s paintings of tropical fish in the downstairs basement, the stockings hung by the fireplace on Christmas eve in the upstairs family room. Opening those stockings on Christmas morning. Our ridiculously huge Christmas trees harvested along access roads, our backyard where we’d planted trees around the perimeter to provide a screen from the neighbours and a connection to the forest beyond. The woodpeckers that would come every year to feed their young at our feeder. The bounty of apples provided by the tree in the front yard we’d planted the first