Oh the joy of university life when, at 16, I left the home of my parents and
moved into residence at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Every day for the first month, girls would line up to
use the one phone provided in the lobby and
we would call home.
Home calling, calling home, crying, sobbing because
home was calling. We may have left home physically but
our spirits were yearning to return to the safety and
warmth of the familiar home.
Only to find upon our return home for holiday that
we had changed and while things stayed the same at home
they seemed different to us.
Or was it that because we had changed
we seemed different to that
unchanged home.
So many years later and
Newfoundlanders are still calling home because
home calls them. Living anywhere in Alberta, be it
Fort McMurray or Lethbridge appears the same in their eyes because
home is calling them and they continue calling home,
a place where they cannot reside.
They live the present in a place they don’t want to learn to call home
they send their money back home and return home as often as possible
they ignore that niggling feeling that home appears different to them and
they don’t want to consider that they are different too.
Home calling them back to a place whose
population has moved from the tiny outports and hamlets to
congregate on the Avalon Peninsula so that by
retirement they will have to admit that both of them have changed.
Home calling, calling home
Calling home, home calling.
Even the meaning of the two words seem to change because
when they finally return to Newfoundland and settle into
retirement, there will be another home calling and
many of them will wish they could return home
to Alberta.
No doubt, many will do just that –
return to this place and see it for the very first time.
--Cecilia Hutchinson
