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 year of moving and the plum trees with it’s terrific display of pink blossoms in the spring. The exotic willow we’d purchased for a pretty penny from Hole’s Greenhouse in St. Albert that died after the second year. How I’d cut it down to the ground and how it grew up from the ground only to survive until this year, the year of our leaving.

Christmas party aftermath

The friends and family who inhabited that house and brought it to life. The annual Christmas party with its regular participants and those who would come every so often and those, like us, who have since left. How I never got the cocktails quite right and Nicola would heat up the hors d’oeuvres at about nine o’clock that my daughters would serve to the various guests scattered about our spacious basement. How, at our very first Christmas party, of all the guests we’d invited, only two couples attended at separate times, the first early in the evening, the second, much later.

The hot summer day, our book club held its meeting in the corner of yard in the shade of two large mountain ash trees, one that we’d bought from a local greenhouse and the other that had risen from a seedling in the other house we’d enjoyed in Slave Lake, the one on a cul-de-sac nicknamed Sesame Street because there were eighteen kids under the age of six living within its borders. The movements of kids became so confusing that my wife had difficulty convincing one of the neighbours that the girl living across the street from us was, in fact, not one of ours and that, in addition to our two girls, we also had a son.

Thanksgiving walk on beach

Without place, I won’t have a reminder of our trips to the lake with small children who played on the beach and, much to our jack russell distress, could occasionally come for a swim with us. We learned to tie the poor dog up after she tried to swim out to us and nearly drowned in the process. Of course, the water was only knee deep for us but well over Anna’s head. Or the long walks with our adult children when they’d come visit on chilly Thanksgiving weekends. sailing after school on warm September afternoons. Or, canoeing to Dog Island on a windy October afternoon, the water choppy, no other boats in sight and my entire family on board, one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. But, we survived.

Stage North Committee with Jesse

And so, I’ll survive the heartbreak of leaving a community where my children grew up, I spent most of my teaching career, I know most of the people at Dog Island Brewery where we enjoyed a pint at the local brewery, the concerts that our group organized, me hosting concerts, telling stupid jokes and getting abused by the audience, watching Chad, one of our regular attendees, play air guitar on stage with Jesse Roper who Chad had requested over and over again to play some song by AC DC.

The yard

These are all memories but they require context, a place. And so, even though I’ve been advised not to, when I visit, I will drive by our old house, check to see if the new owner has chopped down that stupid willow, if there are dogs in the window ready to bark at any other dog person or object that goes by and perhaps howl when the patriarch leaves on his bicycle for work or an errand. Whether they’ve painted the brick as we’d so often planned to do? Do they enjoy the back deck as much as we did? Do they feed the birds and does the woodpecker still visit, the same woodpecker that used to drive our dogs nuts with its high-pitched chirps and erratic flight? Will they stand by gigantic piles of snow, shovel in hand to be photographed as a part of posterity only to have a pile of snow equally high in a couple of years.

The hardy northerner

To leave is to grieve but also to appreciate. We used to complain about Slave Lake but I didn’t realize how much I loved it with all its foibles, eccentricities and aggravations. I won’t miss the cold weather but I’ll miss my cozy basement. I won’t miss chain restaurants but I’ll miss the occasional exception. I won’t miss the quads and side-by-sides but I’ll miss the wilderness that attracts them. I may not miss the politics but I’ll miss the opportunity to hear another’s point of view and still be friends.

And, believe it or not, I’ll miss the edge, that hardiness that makes the northerner a northerner. The winters and the dependence the harsh conditions necessitate. When a neighbour called, I would help and vice versa. Like the time my son was five and didn’t come home after school and it was dark and I made one call and about ten minutes later, it felt like half the town was looking. That’s when you know you’ve found a home.

Will we find another?

Me, not tending bar at Christmas party