Can You go Home Again?

During my vacation I had the opportunity to go back to my childhood home.  Now when I say childhood home I mean that in a fairly loose sense since we travelled around quite a lot, but from the age of 8 to 14 I lived in Burlington and so I feel this was my “real home”.  Stepping out of the car just after we passed our old house was surreal for me.  This was something I had wanted to do for 46 years, wow, 46 years!

       It was funny to remember where our childhood friends lived, here was the babysister’s house, here was the duplicate house to ours, here was my sister’s friend’s house, here’s where the old pear tree used to stand.  Wow, the elementary school, W.E. Breckon was torn down and posh homes built in those acres.  Incredible to think that public property was sold off to private enterprise.  Where were all the children going to go to school?  Busing, apparently.  There were 4 different mass malls on Appleby Line as we approached our suburb.  Front yards had shrunk to accommodate large boulevards and sidewalks which was nice but really made the old homes look dinky small.

       We drove down the old Queen E which is now called Lakeshore Blvd and were stunned to see multimillion dollar homes by the dozens, maybe hundreds.  We were beyond delighted to then discover something unchanged, a Dutch deli that we would sometimes go to in our childhood.  I asked the cashier “how long has this shop been in business” and she replied “56 years”.  When we told her we had come back to visit after 40 years she asked “can you go home again”?  We looked at each other and weren’t quite sure how to answer. 

       For sure, it was not the same neighbourhood with no children at all in sight, no one lived in the homes we used to know, not even our school was still standing.  So I guess my answer is “no”, you can’t go home again.  Things change, we move on.  It’s as simple as that.