Three
years ago, on a crisp October day, my wife and I loaded the new pick-up
truck with our scant belongings and drove north to our new country home
in Oro-Medonte. This was a big move for us having been city folk all our
lives so it was with a mix of excitement and trepidation that we made
this journey. We carried our
big city rhythms with us through those first few weeks as we busily
un-packed, arranged and re-arranged, unaware that we were out of synch
with the cadence of a country autumn. By the first real December
snowfall, though, armed with a good supply of firewood and our brand new
Sorels, we hunkered down for our first winter and began to
drift into a pace more in keeping with our surroundings. It was pretty
near nine months later that our first child, Jacob, was born.
It was spring and we had arrived.
With
a baby to consider now we felt more compelled to plug ourselves into a
community, to find a doctor, a day care, a place to reliably buy food,
diapers and beer. In short, we needed a town. Situated where we were put
us almost equidistant to
Midland, Barrie
and Orillia. For whatever reason we were drawn in the direction
of Orillia. Soon we had a doctor, a day care, a favourite
shopping spot and knew the hours of operation of every beer store in
town. We were happy.
Increasingly,
though, we began to feel unfulfilled by our relationship with Orillia. It had become a town existing simply to service
whatever particular need or appetite that drove us there. We wanted more
than this and began to make a concerted effort to develop a more
meaningful relationship. We started driving into town for no other
reason than to be in town. We went for walks in Couchiching
Park, took Jacob to the beach, visited many of the
smaller stores, had lunch, watched the boats from the boardwalk or just
ambled through some of the neighbourhoods.
Orillia
appreciated our efforts and a relationship emerged.
Still, something was missing.
There existed in us a sense of alienation, of being shadows on
the place, of not belonging. We had many discussions about this trying
to identify the crux of the matter but without success. Perhaps we
needed more time. Perhaps living outside of town meant that it would
always be this way. And so it went, us here and Orillia
there and never the twain shall meet.
Then
something interesting happened. My
sister, who was living in Ottawa
at the time, suddenly decided to move to Orillia
and asked us if we would mind apartment hunting for
her. We were happy to and even excited by the prospect of
exploring
Orillia
in this way. We realized that we hadn’t even set
foot inside an Orillia
residence yet and that this was a significant gap in
our level of intimacy with the place.
This presented a good opportunity.
We were also happy about the idea of a baby sitter, errr..
family member, moving so close. So now we had a reason to dig our teeth
into Orillia; to explore the nuances of its neighbourhoods and
its housing and, even if it was on someone else’s behalf, to consider
more deeply what it would be like to live there.
There’s
nothing like apartment hunting to get to know a town.
After several weeks of searching we finally found the perfect
apartment, a smallish one bedroom on John Street. The mood there was good and, although we were a
little nervous about choosing someone else’s accommodations,
we were pretty sure my sister would like it so we laid our
deposit down. When she
arrived a few days later we watched anxiously as she drank in her new
surroundings, the place she would call home, and
were relieved when we saw a smile form on her face and knew she
loved it. So now my sister
was embarking on her own relationship with a new town and my wife and I
became beneficiaries of her
efforts. She made discoveries in the first week that I wouldn’t have
noticed if I lived there my whole life. She knew within minutes, for
instance, where to get the best deal on bulk toilet paper and which
stores sold frozen macaroni and cheese, two subtleties of
Orillia
that had escaped me completely.
Orillia
changed for us when my sister arrived.
Now we had a place to go while our car was being fixed, a fridge
to raid when ours was bare. Now there was a good chance we would bump
into someone we actually knew when walking down Mississaga Street.
Orillia
became more than just a place to buy bread. It
became a place for visiting family. For me, my sister’s apartment was
a place that always had an open door and a bag of cheezies, for my wife
it was a place for tea and
girl talk and for my son, well, he liked her drawer of screwdrivers. Orillia
became a home.
One
year later, as suddenly as she had decided to come there, my sister
decided to leave Orillia. Our mooring was gone and we felt adrift again.
That open screen door on John Street
had come to mean a lot to us. Someone else lives in
that apartment now, someone we don’t know, someone, I have noticed,
who prefers to keep the screen door closed.
And so our struggle to find our place in Orillia
goes on, little by little, encounter by encounter.
It takes time to feel at home in a new place. Recently I was able to
give directions in town to someone who had lost their way--a big step
towards a sense of belonging. And although my sister no longer lives in Orillia
there is an indelible image of family lingering on
the place now, reminding us that it is not what’s there that matters,
its who.
