It Is Good To Go Home

By Saoirse Aherne, Staff Writer

Sometime in mid October, I started to experience a feeling I cannot quite explain. It struck me first while I was walking home from a night out along a narrow and quiet cobblestone street in Menton. It was a full-body feeling, a longing to experience the same quiet and softness of night, but on a street right by the house in which I grew up. I pictured myself there, trudging through slush, watching snowflakes catch in the staggered beams of street lamps. I was not remembering any night in particular – I had walked this path more times than I could count– I was simply remembering being in that place.

Throughout my first year, I had barely missed home, and now I was aching to walk along streets so familiar to my feet that I could not get lost if I tried, streets so full of memories that they blurred into one comforting blanket of belonging; I wanted to be wrapped up in that certainty again.

By December I was desperately excited to return home. I am from a place that feels even smaller than it is. Gray and run down, it wilts in the glow of Menton’s beauty. But I love it for that. Peterborough,

Ontario is unassuming and humble in such a way that I want to wrap my arms around it, either to protect it, or maybe in sympathy.

Once I arrived home, I spent an embarrassing amount of time at the one local bar frequented by young people. On my first night there I met: six girls from my high school, two girls from my soccer team, a girl I know from community theater, two girls I went to daycare with, a girl who lives on my street and my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. Perhaps this is the case with every small town, but it is truly impossible to go anywhere in Peterborough without seeing someone you know. Some people hate it; when I lived there I certainly did. But now, I find it thrilling. I feel like my whole life is bottled up in “The Social” bar on a Friday night. I adore overly intense drunken reunions with people from the past, shouting over terrible music about school, jobs, growing up.

Every time I go out, I meet a new set of friends that I forgot I missed. It reminds me of how many wonderful people I have had the pleasure to know, and it warms my heart to see them remember me as well. I feel like I fit right into a hole that was made for me, in this tapestry of hometown individuals. Peterborough used to trap me in a suffocating network of relationships, but now that I have left, settling back into this cradle is relieving and safe. I do not have to question whether these people like me or whether I will know them in 10 or 20 years. We don’t have to be close, but we will always be bound by the place in which we grew up. They are as inherent to me as Monaghan Road, Jackson’s Park, the London Street Bridge or Little Lake.

When I walk around Peterborough, every setting sparks a flood of memories. It is so much deeper than concrete and bricks, a place more complex than anywhere in the world to me. I peel away layers and layers of life as I walk to and from my house; shockingly, so little has changed since I was a child. People and places — seeing how impermanent these things can be has made home so special.

I do not regret leaving Peterborough for a second. I remember how desperately I wanted to get out, and in fact, almost all of my friends have left to study across the province. But I am glad I now see so much beauty in a town I used to resent. My friends and I have talked a lot about this in the past few weeks; leaving has made us all certain of our attachment to home.

In Menton, life is in flux; we sentence ourselves to make wonderful friends only to disperse across the globe after two short years. I have spent my 2A feeling random. I loved that novel feeling in the first year, but it gets tiring. Now, rejuvenated by my time at home, feeling so perfectly known and so unwaveringly attached to my town and its people, I am ready to be untethered again.