On Saturday, John and I rode our bikes out to Clarkson. If you take the Waterfront Trail, it’s about 55km there and back, which makes it a good training ride for the big 200km Ride to Conquer Cancer in two weeks. It’s our go to route, as it’s relatively easy to drop down to the waterfront from our house. It’s also very pretty, albeit super busy on a Saturday, with jacked up weekend warriors on their slick super cycles, dodging toddlers, and grandmas and picnicking New Canadians.

Another feature of that route is that we pass my old stomping grounds in Port Credit. I didn’t do as much stomping there as the rest of my family, as they all moved there from Montreal when I was 12, and I was put in a boarding school. As a result, I was only there for Christmases and summers, but it was home, as much as any place could be. I realize this information raises more questions than it answers, and we’ll get to that somewhere down the line. In any case, Port Credit was where I used to live. My brother and sisters went to school there. I met my first – no, my second boyfriend there. I went to sailing camp at the Port Credit Yacht Club. I hung out at Richard’s Memorial Park, where we buried one of our cat’s stillborn kittens. We had family dinners at Michael’s Back Door restaurant. Looking back, it was kind of a dusty little suburban town at the time, and not the Cake by the Lake it is today. All I remember is that I couldn’t wait to catch the last Go Train out of there, and eventually I did.

Our house, of course, is still there, although my mother sold it some time ago. It’s always strange to see your childhood home as an adult. It often appears so much smaller that you remember, and oddly bland and unimpressive. It has a non-descript paint job, and could use new windows. The lawn and gardens that my parents looked after so meticulously (one of the few things they did together relatively harmoniously) have gone to seed. There are no chairs on the front porch – “Veranda Beach”, my mother called it. There is absolutely no indication of the lives that were lived there for over 20 years, the parties, the fights, the drama, the sadness, the laughter. It’s just a house like any other. Maybe a little less welcoming. “It’s a hag”, said my sister Louise when she saw it not too long ago. Harsh, but she lives in Paris. You may have heard that it’s quite nice there.

In any case, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, you can’t go home again, and why should you? I always turn my bike around and head back to the city with a sigh of relief and satisfaction. You can’t go home again, but you can make yourself your home.

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