The year is 1630. My French ancestors prepare to leave their home in La Rochelle by the sea for Canada. They eventually reside in Baie-Comeau, Quebec, which rests on the St. Lawrence River. My Grandfather grows up there.

The year is 1951. My Nonno (grandfather) boards a ship in Naples that will bring him to Canada. His sister is already living in Port Alberni. His wife, my Nonna (grandmother), won’t join him for another year. My father will be born in Burnaby in 1953. My Nonno will build two homes in Port Alberni, one of which my Zia (Aunt) still lives in to this day.

The year is 1987. My mother gives birth to me in the Regina General Hospital. We only live in Regina for two years before relocating to the Okanagan Valley, on unceded Sylix territory. The Okanagan is a horn of plenty of orchards, vineyards, and lakes. The climate is dry and arid, so different than here in Vancouver.

Our house rests on top of a hill with a magnificent view of a vivid blue arm of Okanagan Lake below, and dry sage hills above. The arm doesn’t have a name. In fact maybe it’s not an arm at all. The lake is long and it slithers all the way down to Penticton. At its tip it stretches almost up to Armstrong. It forks at the end. Maybe instead of an arm it’s a forked tongue of a snake. In the evening when we sit out back we watch bats swoop in the dark, hear owls screech in the night, coyotes yip in the hills, and a symphony of frogs croak in the wall my father built from rocks.

I’ve lived in Vancouver for 15 years, and yet I still say I’m going home for Christmas, I’m going home for Thanksgiving. When I graduated high school I was quick to say I’d never return. Now as an adult I’m not so sure. If I leave, I might not miss the rain or the damp, but I will miss the sea, the mountains, and old growth trees.

This year I went to Europe for the first time. I went to France and Italy. The wide sea in Nice reminded me of Vancouver Island. The rolling Tuscan Hills looked just like the Okanagan. How could I be so far from home and yet feel at home? The food that grows there is like nothing I’ve tasted before. A tomato looks like a tomato, but tastes like…well, the tomatoes I ate as a child from my Nonno’s garden in Port Alberni. The wine tastes like…well, the wine from my Nonno’s cellar, made from vines he brought with him from Italy. The richest, most intensified flavour. I hear people speaking French and Italian around me, in the streets, restaurants, and cafes. Languages that were so familiar around the dining room tables of my childhood that I could never speak. But I listened.

My relationship to home is in my relations. My family has uprooted but the roots are still there, just like when you pull vines up from the earth, pieces always stay behind. I visit France and I’m surrounded by the sea; I visit Italy and I’m entangled in the vines. There is a home my grandparents built on the island. There is a home my parents built in the Okanagan. I have family I’ve never met in Italy. Somewhere in France there are people I am connected to. Can home be all of these places, and nowhere at once? And how do I consolidate all these existences with the fact that I live on colonised, stolen land?

Maybe the lake is an arm after all. Maybe it’s my arm reaching back. Should I go back?

The first photo is of the Okanagan Valley, the second is of Friuli, where my Nonno grew up.

Works Cited:

Fpcc. FirstVoices, www.firstvoices.com/explore/FV/sections/Data/nsyilxcən/nsyilxcən/Syilx.

“Okanagan Falls: Okanagan Valley: Thompson Okanagan.” Travel British Columbia, www.travel-british-columbia.com/thompson-okanagan/okanagan-valley/okanagan-falls/.

Draper, Robert. “The Best Italian Wine Region You’ve Never Heard Of.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 23 Oct. 2015, www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/venice-friuli-wine-region-vineyard-enoteca-italy-180956875/.