The Home Post

We have just returned from a weekend my my parents house. At a certain point in your life you have to stop calling it 'home' and start calling it 'my parents' house'. When it was 'home', there were three children living there. We only had one bathroom, which by today's standards would qualify you for sub standard living conditions. Every single friend you wanted to call was 'long distance' and there was no such thing as 'walking 'round to the store' as Beaudry's was five kilometers away. You literally could not see the forest for the trees - a situation which has not improved despite my dad's numerous chainsaws and grandsons now on the scene. When it was home, I was little and young and everything was bigger. The yard was big, the house was big, my parents' friends houses were big. The cows across the road were big and even my parents themselves were big. Now I am big and all of those things are small. In the wintertime we used to shovel off the deck outside the kitchen. The deck was impossibly vast and as such, tons of snow piled up and it took countless hours to shovel this over the edge of the second-floor deck into an Everestial peak miles below us. When we were finished, my dad used to pick us up, hoist us up over the railings and drop us into the snow...a veritable 7 or 8 second drop to the fluffy white pile below. The deck has now been replaced by an addition and in retrospect, I don't think the deck could have been more than 10' x 12' and at most was about 10' off the ground in the summer...likely about four feet once we had piled up the snow. There are now two bathrooms at my parents' house, although one of them makes a funny noise when you flush and neither of them are to be 'used' for fear of backing something up or running out of water or 'breaking' the toilet... The cows are no longer very big either...they too have been replaced by smaller beef cattle; easier to manage I think and likely a better market. I am quite sure my dad couldn't pick me up and hoist me over the railings anymore either, which is just as well since I'm pretty sure that all that 'hoisting' when i was young dislocated my shoulder and now it aches when I sleep funny. I still hear the mice in the walls when I sleep in one of the funny little off-chute bedrooms and I love, love, love the smell of the fireplace and the wood stove. Even in the summer. But now it is not home. Home is where my bathroom has rules of its own and instead of mice you hear sirens. There are no cows for miles around, but if cats could produce milk or meat...on second thought, that's just gross. And now the only place that is 'long distance' is my parents house.