I went up to Sudbury
this past week for my grandson's birthday, to watch him at a basketball
practice and then two days later at a game as well as a whole day of watching
my granddaughter play in a volleyball tournament. While most of my trips are
not as busy as that, I have gladly made the five hour drive at least four or five
times a year for the past seven or so years. One of the joys of the trip (quite
frankly there are relatively few on the drive up and back) is looking at the
various rock cuts that have been carved out of the pre-Cambrian Shield to
create the highway. There are a few sections where the thin white or pink
granite lines buried in the darker rock are almost vertical suggesting massive
geological upheavals in the past. As I was driving by the rock cuts on Friday,
I reminded myself that the next time I drove south and it was a sunny day, I
should stop and take a picture of these remarkable reminders of the earth's
long distant and turbulent history. Then I remembered that I in all likelihood will
never drive that highway again. I will go up one more time on my way west, but
never again drive south.
While, especially because the state of my apartment, I am
constantly reminded that I am moving - I sometimes forget that moving means
that I won't be coming back here again. That every time I drive down a street,
it might be the last time that I do so. Every time I think about that, I grieve
a little bit. Every time I realize that there are so many people or places that
I will never see again, I want to cry. I have lived almost my entire adult life
in the counties of Haliburton, Victoria or Peterborough. There are literally
hundreds of highways, streets and back roads that I have travelled on. There
are almost secret waterfalls, meadows in the middle of nowhere and dark cold
lakes and rivers that I can see so clearly in my mind but that I will never see
again in reality. I think of getting a good car and going for a four or five
day drive to re-visit those places one more time, But I suspect some of those
places such as the Eddy on Coleman Lake Road or the Fur Farm where my son and I
spent so many hours fishing are probably over built and almost disappeared.
Perhaps it is better that I remember it the way I want to, rather than the way
it is now. But I will miss those spots and a hundred others. I will never drive
by or at least think about driving by all of the homes that I built, all of the
places where I worked or any of the places where I hung out and made friends
while arguing about politics, values or the way the world could be.
A week ago I needed to contact someone in a local organization.
I had tried but it felt as if my e-mail had probably gotten lost in the
over-whelming number of emails that flood most of our mail servers. So I
contacted a friend who works part time for that organization and asked who I
should contact. Within a few hours I had a response to my question. When I
emailed my friend to thank her for her help I said "...... one of the
harder things about thinking about moving is the realization that I am moving
to a place where I sort of know some people, but I am going to have to make new
relationships with people who know how things work." That quite frankly scares
the living crap out of me. I am not a particularly social person. Quite often
the social niceties that are required to make those connections are beyond me.
I am moving to a place that while I know the geography a
little bit and I know a few people - I am starting over. I have no history in
the place, I (outside of my son and his family) only know a few people and I
perhaps will never understand how the social system works. I am going from
someone who knows a lot of people, including some who make the system work, and
as someone who has in a few small sectors created part of that system to
someone who will always be someone who just moved in later in life.
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