I realize that this post is incredibly late, but I wanted to share it anyways.

In reading over some of my fellow students’s blogs concerning our stories of home, I found several through lines that permeated our narratives. I want to discuss three main elements that I found in common across our blogs.  Firstly, I found that there was a repeated emphasis on home as being something that is fluid and mobile, rather than something fixed and static. This was articulated in Hava Rosenburg’s story as home being “in transit,” both literally and figuratively: “Home is riding the 41 down Marine Drive,” and in Hannah Vaartnou’s narrative, as something which escaped easy definition but which she equates with the ocean (interesting to note how the sea is itself an iconic symbol of change and of kinesis). In both of these depictions, home is fluid. Notions of home seem to reject easily definable boundaries. Home seems to exist just as much in the “in-betweens” as it does in the centres. This notion is in dialogue with my own narrative of home, and my depiction of home as an ‘estuary.’ Secondly, there was a sense that the notion of home is not one without problems. In all three blogs that I read, home was not something that was taken up without a certain critical lens. Hayden Cook closes his piece by investigating the geo-politics of home. He asks whose home is it? Is it the home of “the people who live there, the Tsuu T’ina, the government who restricts development…?” His piece addresses the problematics of overlaying one narrative of home onto the other. In Hannah’s account, she juxtaposes her idea of home against the archetypal versions of home that we are exposed to through dominant cultural narratives and through the media. This tension between a culturally sanctioned version of ‘home’ and the home that we are constantly in the process of crafting, is one which Hannah’s narrative explores. Finally, I found there was an emphasis on nostalgia and memory in our accounts of home. I found again that there was a tension in these descriptions of nostalgia. On the one hand there was a sense of nostalgia in its seductive potential, as something to which we cling indulgently, and on the other hand, as something which is essentially illusory.