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| April 2010 issue |
I came across an old issue of Canadian Geographic, last April's as a matter of fact, with a terrific essay and great photography of the author's home town Wallaceburg, Ontario. I've never been to Wallaceburg; I don't have to go; I grew up in my own home town.
The essay captured everything I remember of 'back home': the river; the land; the people. It talked of the hay days and the bust days but mostly, it listed everything that anyone from a small town has ever seen or touched in their town with all of it etched in memory, completely forgotten until someone else writes it down but there it is - your town.
"The bar where everyone buys that first beer. The church where you learned to believe. The tattoo parlour you were warned away from... the cemetery where the town buries its dead. The hockey arena and the baseball fields and the parks. The weekly euchre gatherings.The hospital where your mother passed away; where your daughter had her tonsils removed.... And the river that runs through all of it, "
People say that I didn't grow up in a small town 'coz I was sent home each summer and so missed the winters, the falls and the springs. Some years, I was home. Some years, I was just visiting at odd times when summer was a distant past or something to look forward to. And 'some years', are the ones right now that I've missed, year after year and season after season, because now I live so far away, that I don't go home anymore but it's not just the distance.
Robertson's essay reminded me to go home in my mind. He gave me all the prose, all the synapses popping and sizzling to the exact point where I can feel the breeze and hear the poplars sway and squint into the light while the cicadas wind up for a good one.
Lucky to be able to write like that. Kudos to Ray Robertson.
