Prompt: Write a short story (600 – 1000 words max) that describes your sense of home and the values and stories that you use to connect yourself to your home and respond to all comments on your blog.

Hi all,

What or where is home? I spent the better half of the past few days mulling over this prompt, trying to attach it to a specific house or apartment from my childhood.  I think the natural reaction when someone asks us to talk about our “sense of home” is to think of a physical place, the city we grew up in, the neighbourhood we reminisce about when we think of our childhood, and usually most importantly, “the iconic house”.  The house with the white picket fence with the tire swing hanging form the big oak tree on the front lawn, the patio where we had our first kiss and countless summer barbecues, the living room where we had movie nights and christmas mornings.  Unfortunately, this idea of “home” doesn’t always fit for everyone, and the pressure to be able to pull up a memory and place like this had me struggling to find “a house” to talk about.  It wasn’t until I allowed myself to let go of this stagnant idea of what home has to be, as a physical house, that I was able to discover what home really means to me.

For me, home is not a physical house or a neighbourhood block.  To me, home is comfort, familiarity, safety, love, and most importantly, family.  Home isn’t just one place, but rather an idea, a feeling that I have experienced in various different places throughout my life.  One of my most vivid memories from my childhood of feeling at home has been on the road.  I was born in Calgary after my parents first immigrated from China in order to pursue graduate school in Canada.  My parents were young, scared, but filled with hope for the promises for a better and brighter future for themselves and my brother and I in Canada.  For them, home was an even tougher question.  They had left everything they knew back home in China, their friends, their family, their sense of culture and identity to try to make it in North America.  But they couldn’t dwell on the idea of leaving this idea of home behind, they were forced to look forward and create a new home, for themselves and us kids.  For them, home was their new, small family, and the adventures we were about to take on together.  Like most students…my parents were broke.  My childhood never had the iconic house.  Instead, my family made our memories through countless road trips.  From as far back as I can remember, my parents would take us on road trips all across North America in our $900 Ford Mercury Cougar Station Wagon.  It was the times spent riding around in this beat up little station wagon, and values of togetherness, love, safety and comfort that I find my truest memories of home.

It looked a little like this.  Real old school.

One of my most vivid memories is from the summer of 1999.  My family had decided to do a camping trip up to Yellowstone National Park for a couple of days.  We packed snacks and pop and a handful of crinkly worn out paper maps (in the days before GPS…) and hopped into our car.  Our trip went off without a hitch, and other than a few bad mosquito bites, I was happy.  However, on our drive home from Yellowstone to Calgary, my parents got lost and took a wrong turn.  We ended up on a rocky gravel path that lead us onto Highway 29, unbeknownst to us at the time as the infamous “Going-To-The-Sun Road” (little did we know, it was a highway that was infamous for its impossible driving conditions and high rate of accidents).

^The infamous highway in all its scary, dangerous glory.

As we crept slowly further and further onto this dangerous path that winded along the mountain and into the clouds, it became apparent that we had made a mistake.  My dad, usually so confident and comfortable at the wheel of the car, was hesitant and uncharacteristically quiet.  I could tell that he did not like the looks of this road, with our car hugging the side of the mountain and an ungated, free falling cliff only inches away.  However, there was no way we could turn back.  All we could do was move forward and get through until we got to the other side of the mountain.  As I glanced at my dad’s furrowed brow in the rear view mirror, and my moms white knuckles clutching the side of her seat, I felt scared.  I remember the next few hours in a fuzzy blur, as we crept along in silence, focusing on just making it through this mountain pass, and holding my moms hand.  Luckily, we made it out alive, and the trip went down in history as one of the most memorable experiences we’ve ever had.  I remember two days after we got back to Calgary, there was a story in the news about a mini van that had been travelling on that very infamous road, “Going-To-The-Sun-Road” that got into a horrible accident when it veered off and slid off the cliff.  It’s odd because, looking back on this moment, the tension and terror that filled the air, and knowing now in retrospect how many dangerous accidents have occurred on that narrow, winding road, it shouldn’t be a memory that comes up when I think of home.  However, if was those little moments, holding my moms hand, being terrified, that I found more safety and comfort and love than in any other of my fondly cherished memories.  No matter how scared I was in that moment, I felt a sense of calm and security that one can only find from the presence of one’s parents, of one’s family, when it feels like all you’ve got is each other.

So, maybe I never had that iconic grand house with the white picket fence and the tire swing out back.  Maybe there is no single house to “house” all of the memories of home that I have, and it’s just a jumble of condos and rented apartments that don’t fit the image I have when I think of “home”.  But maybe a home is not always just a house.  Maybe it’s memories like this one from our adventure on “Going-To-The-Sun-Road”, that resemble the true concept of home and belonging to me.  And I think I like that just fine.

Works Cited

Peterson, Christopher. “Teen Killed in Sun Road Wreck.” Hagadone Corporation. Flat Head News Group, 8 Sept. 2004. Web. 05 June 2015. <http://www.flatheadnewsgroup.com/hungryhorsenews/news/teen-killed-in-sun-road-wreck/article_a75f833c-5507-567e-903b-52e179e0e86f.html>.

United States. National Park Service. “Yellowstone National Park (U.S. National Park Service).” National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, 18 May 2015. Web. 05 June 2015. <http://www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm>.