I was fortunate that our family didn’t move around a whole lot when I was growing up. If I walked to the back of the high school went outside and through a little gate in the fence, I would be in the parking lot of the hospital where I was born. When I was born, we actually lived in a small village outside of town, but when I was too young to remember (before I was two years old, I think), we moved to the first house I remember living in. And we didn’t move until I was in grade 7.

That year, we moved within town. We didn’t need to change schools; in fact, we were now living next door to the elementary school I’d attended since junior kindergarten. This had good and bad points, but getting rid of the half-hour walk to school was good. This was also the house where I first had my own room (even though it was barely wide enough for the bed and a path to walk alongside it).

What I remember of this move was a lot of people helping. We had relatives and neighbours offering a hand…and even a priest I didn’t know yet. (I didn’t realise priests could be that young!) But it was only about a half-mile from one house to the other, so we had pick-up trucks and car trips. I don’t know, I may have even pedalled my own bicycle from one house to the other.

Then, my father got a new job, and during my last year of high school, he moved midway through the year, and we followed just a day or two after I finished high school. And I was about to experience living in a different town.

The first thing to get over was the distance. It took something like 10 hours to drive to our new home in northern Ontario, and the last stretch of the drive had almost three hours of absolutely nothing: not even a little village to break the monotony of trees, trees, and more trees. And it was a small place. It’s the only place where (despite the fact I only lived there for about a month before going off to holidays and then university) I remember my public library card number. I had card number 07. I kind of wish there was another zero ahead of the number. I don’t know what the numbering system was (maybe the zero was to indicate I was a student, eligible for a free library card?)

His job paid for real movers that time though we did all the packing ahead of time, and so I remember the truck pulling up on moving day. I remember the conversation with the driver, and him speaking of a couple of small northern Ontario towns, one en route to our new home (Kapuskasing) and one a few hours beyond (Thunder Bay). I had always heard the former pronounced as kap-us-KAY-sing…but he pronounced it kap-OOS-ka-sing (presumably a francophone pronunciation; while I speak French, I don’t think I ever came across this town’s name in the language). The second was just the accent making it sound like TUNDER Bay. I have a love of different accents and different ways of saying words, but sometimes it’s funny. (Of course, it is hard to restrain that from being expressed, since I don’t want to seem like I’m laughing at them.)

And then I was off to university and plenty of moves back and forth from Kingston, Ontario to the village where my grandmother lived (which is where I spent my summers). And as a university student, everything that I owned came with me (unless it was still in boxes in my parents’ house). Those moves were always accomplished in a relative’s vehicle: sometimes my father’s, sometimes my great uncle’s car. And the trunk and the back seat would be crammed, and the driver and I would sit in the front seats.

I also remember the first time we came home (about a month after I moved there, on our way for summer vacation back in the Ottawa area) and we were about three or four hours from the town where I’d grown up when we noticed a vehicle that looked kind of familiar. And when we got to North Bay, we each pulled into the parking lot of a Tim Hortons coffee shop. And who do we find, but people who had attended the same church as us in my hometown. It is a small world.

For a while after university, I was living with my family again. In that relatively short time, the family moved twice, and then I was in my own apartment for a few months. And then, I moved back to the town where I grew up. I added it up and from birth to age 18, I moved only twice. In the following seven years, I moved ten times. Since that period, I’ve lived in the same apartment now for nearly six years, back in my hometown.

And if there’s one thing I know about myself: I never intend to move that frequently again! As rarely as I can make it, in fact!