The places that shape who we become
There is a truly odd grief in being an observer over time as a place changes, especially when that place is where our childhood happened.
I have spent a lot of time in recent years reflecting on the significance of where we come from and how it molds us into the people we become, especially as we all seem to struggle with a sense of being overwhelmed with what the modern world has become. I have spent most of my adult life away from where I grew up in Saskatchewan, but have never ceased to carry her unassuming beauty and seemingly endless fields with me everywhere I’ve gone: the Western coast of Canada for school, an Austrian village for further studies, London for the music industry, Los Angeles for all of my dreams. I have often, often said that I am so grateful to someone from that place. I can’t imagine surviving these other environments without the grounding I was given growing up there.
But it has changed, and every time I return, I feel the change only intensely more. It is not really the place I grew up. It never struck me as odd until I left and returned that every time I would get on Highway 5 to go into the downtown area or other sections of the city, that there was a stretching field to my left, full of sun-glinted wheat in the summer and sparkling snow in the winter (and the muddy brown haze in between).
We lived on what was the edge of the city when I was growing up, on the far East side of Saskatoon. When we moved into my main childhood home when I was 5, I remember walking a couple of blocks to bury the caterpillar I had tried to keep as a pet but which quickly died in captivity. It was all open fields, and my caterpillar did not have to compete for grave space.
Watching a childhood landscape disappear
Of course, throughout my youth while I was distracted by school, extracurricular activities, and my consuming dreams of Hollywood, the world built up around me. But none of this felt particularly violent: it was just more homes like mine, still on the edge of the city, and a bit before the materials had become even more homogenized. My street was mostly built with stucco and siding, but there were colors and shapes and textures. My highway field stayed ever-present, with the exception of a golfing range which didn’t obstruct the view or the essential experience.
In the last while, however, that has changed, and at a certain point, I realized I couldn’t really ever go back home again, because the home I knew was no longer as it was. I was different, everyone was different, and this was symbolically embodied in the sea of homes with grey mock-rock materials stretching where the fields used to be. There was now an obnoxious movie theatre complex and gym in my line of view. Downtown—our little downtown—was growing high-rises from the roots of our humble history. Every time I’m home, I end up driving by some place I used to frequent and notice the sign has changed, and often the nature of the business itself; the quaint coffee shop is now a franchised pizza chain, the thrift shop is now an electronics store, the bagel shoppe I worked at is just another strip mall store and no one remember’s Reggie’s. Sailor Dan, too, isn’t on the corner anymore selling his pencil boat drawings, and no one ever talks about him.
And the trees—this is a good and beautiful, organic change that doesn’t haunt the same way but does still indicate the inexorable movement of time—have grown tall and strong and sturdy, leaning over the homes that once towered over their fragile sprouts.
Nostalgia, memory, and the passing of time
None of this is inherently bad, although I do have many thoughts about mass-produced materials and global franchises and what they are doing to our inner world and conception of ourselves and others. But it’s also not neutral: things change and we can’t help but grieve the absolute fragility of our lives and everything in it.
Our lives are so short. What seemed a steady eternity as a child quickly shows itself to be replaceable and moldable, before we can even really remember to take the mental photograph to cement the reality.
And so the strange grief enters, paired with nostalgia for all that was and can never be again. We only have, truly, the present moment—and inside of that moment, the flickering memory of all that has shaped us.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 