Why Canada continues to be my home and native land!

I’m not your garden variety Canadian. I don’t own a Hudson’s Bay blanket. I don’t go to hockey games anymore. I’ve stopped being nice. I’m no longer so polite. And I gave up my citizenship when I became an American many years ago. But I can’t seem to shake my country of origins, especially now that Trump has become so enamoured with making Canada the 51st state. It makes me want to give up my American citizenship and leave this country that he’s destroying. But at my age, such a move would be extremely difficult. I’ve lived in the America three times longer than I have in Canada.

Of course, all of my family still lives in Canada, including my wonderful son, and I return when I can to visit them. Yet even if my family vanished tomorrow, I would be drawn back to my homeland, like a moth to light. The land and the culture got planted in me as a child, and I can’t shake either. I’m constantly forced to return there, if not physically then emotionally, as if on an archaeological dig, trying to uncover what lurks beneath its surface, the missing parts of myself.

O Canada! My home and native plant: A Freudian slip, a twist on the line “My home and native land.” Except the natives have almost vanished and so have my previous homes. The land is vanishing too, cities taking over, nothing much planted there. Very little remains of the places where I grew up in Calgary and Langdon. Either progress or decay has attacked the structures I lived in, leaving me only with memories, the most unreliable of mediums.

And so I look for clues as I work on another memoir, wanting to throw open the doors of childhood: W. G. Sebald says, “No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.” And in Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that “Childhood is next best to probing one’s eternity.” The material is endless—even if we aren’t.