It took exactly two years, but I rolled into Plamondon the other day and it felt like home. That relief I assume everyone knows crested on the horizon of consciousness; finally, home.

This was not the moment it first dawned on me. It was at the pizza shop, the second time I sat for a meal at their tables, when the young lady asked me if I was going to the event at the school, because she had studied with my wife and knew me, though I didn’t know her. That was the first moment I felt the change but I couldn’t name that feeling yet.

We’re all making virtues of our choices as a survival instinct, subscribing to an adaptive view of reality in which we are not all assholes and fools. This makes me wary of celebrating my love for my little house and land too much. I would presumably feel the desire to celebrate it even if it were much shittier.

Mustering my best approximation of an objective view, however, this is a very nice place to live. Yes, it could have a fence and might yet some day. Yes, I live in what is usually called a trailer on an algaefied lake, with no water or sewer service, so I have to arrange for my own. Had I not lived here, I probably would have never known for sure that a family of four with our high quality of life uses 400 L of fresh water per day. I know that now as certainly as I know anything. On a weekend day full of dishes and laundry chores, it’s more like 600 L.

When Ava and I met, which is a great story not for the faint of heart, I rented a single-wide almost exactly like the house we have today on the mountainside in West Creston, BC. Our romance grew, and Ava moved in there with me. It is a small but precious part of our happiness here that it reminds us of back then, when I was 29 and she was 24. We’ve been together almost 17 years and it all started when we both took jobs at the same place in Creston.

Plamondon is kind of like West Creston, if Lac La Biche is Creston; but all that is besides the point. The air, the animals, the sounds, the smells, the forest, a little garden, a morning chore that gives me an excuse to be active in the early hours, the big, south facing windows, the giant Jurassic rhubarb, my retired pastor neighbour, the school-bus down the country road, the nearby beach with ice cream–all these together are very fine.

The itinerary of our journey goes from Creston to Edmonton, to Vancouver, to Erlangen, to Edmonton, to St. John’s, to Edmonton, to Plamondon, and one gets the feeling that there will be only one more move, back to Edmonton, hopefully when we are very old. It all depends on where the kids end up, of course.

I love the city but there’s always been this draw of the countryside, and I surrender. The Boreal Forest and the lakes can have me.