Prompt # 20 - The Feeling of Home

Prompt # 20 - The Feeling of Home


Everything I write is about home. I have used the title “Writing Home” more than once, and published a creative non-fiction piece “Without a Map” about one of our regular return visits to the old home place on the Manitoba prairie. It's all about home or the feeling of home. Of belonging. To some place. It's place that connects us to the planet.



All my places have trees. At the first place, the farm outside Oak River, the trees were poplar, Manitoba maple, American elm, willow. With, on the lawn, lilac, honeysuckle, caragana, and the fir tree my mother “rescued” from a road allowance ditch near the national park boundary. And in the bush, there were hawthorn, saskatoon, chokecherry, box, and wolf willow. This home had lots of space, big sky, sunsets, with stars, bright moons, northern lights.


In Winnipeg the trees were mostly American elm, so big that their branches entwined over the pavement making in summer a green nave in front of my house on Ruby Street. There was also an avenue of elms leading into the University of Manitoba campus, planted as a war memorial. I think they are gone now, victims of Dutch Elm disease.


When I first moved to BC, the trees around the house in Agassiz included fir, weeping willow, holly, laurel, and black walnut, with a wild cherry and a bouquet of white birch at the back, a yew tree in front of my studio, wisteria over the front deck, and some strange vine-like “weed” tree, perhaps acacia. I looked that up. It looks like Robinia pseudoacacia .


The year after my mother died, I moved to live on a corner of the ranch where she grew up. The trees there are ponderosa pine with an old Manitoba maple in the yard, brought when the family migrated west. Willow trees, and a flowering quince. Something with hot pink flowers. The Kettle River valley is high and long and people take their lawn chairs outside every night to sit and watch the sunset.


Out here they have a saying about someone who likes to dress the part--”He's more hat than cattle.” My place now is like that, “more tree than lawn,” and that's exactly the way I want it. Mostly grand fir, some hemlock, cedar nearby, dogwood, at the front, over the rhododendron and box and the moss lawn, a bouquet of “weed maple.” With fern around the edges. The mountain to the west blocks the setting sun, but the mountain to the east, the backside of Mount Hope, is a spectacular view, especially when the sun climbs it in the morning and then bursts out, and when the moon climbs the mountain at night. It is really too beautiful. So beautiful that I sacrifice work and opportunities and choose to stay happily home instead. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic because the neighbour is out there as I write, wielding his chain saw.


I've been ridiculed in the past about my love of trees. A tour of the Scottish highlands with only pictures of trees. “But where are the people,” viewers ask, perplexed. But the answer is simple: “I didn't know any people. Just trees.” Don't know why or how this obsession started. Something to do perhaps with names. My grandmother born a Woodland, my godmother a Mrs Grove.


My homes have to have a river too. My home town was called Oak River, although we were maybe three miles west of the river bank. There were sloughs along the lane and behind the barnyard. In Winnipeg I lived on both the Red and Assiniboine rivers, and in northern Manitoba, along the Nelson River. In BC I've lived in the Fraser River valley and steps from the Kettle River. Home today is within the sound of Silver Creek as it makes its final rush to the Fraser River. If only I could get this darn upload to work, you could hear it too.