Introduction

      “Space transforms into place as it acquires definition and meaning.”

      —Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place

      “The imagination of going home so frequently means going ‘back’ in both space and time. Back to the old familiar things, to the way things used to be. … [T]he truth is that you can never simply ‘go back,’ to home or to anywhere else. When you get ‘there’ the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed.”

      —Doreen Massey, For Space

      It is the height of spring. Winnipeg’s annual thaw is soaking the soil, filling rivers to the brim. Silt water floods the lowlands depositing new, fertile mud. Wet clouds ride warm air, raining fresh water from the sky. And as the sun reaches through the atmosphere to touch my bare skin, my body remembers. Hot August, the relief of shade, the sweet scent of sunbaked skin. Today I’m leaving on a journey to find the homes of my past. Only one of the places I’ll visit was a former residence of mine; the others are homes I have inherited through ancestry. I’ll be visiting the Parish of Rathven, Scotland, where the last Scottish Elricks of my paternal line lived prior to their emigration in the mid-nineteenth century. Then I’ll be in Salzburg, Austria where my mother was born and raised until age ten, with a final stop in Abbotsford, British Columbia where I spent my first twenty years.

      What is home? Since childhood, I have played with various definitions, trying to get at the heart of the concept, to pin it down with meaning. At its most basic, home is a place to be from, a current address or childhood residence. Then again, home can also be as nondescript as a region on a map or a suburb vibe or a downtown feel. Almost immediately, the definition gets complicated. I have come back again and again to the axiom “home is where the heart is,” which my mother had hanging in cross-stitch on the kitchen wall of the Monashee house where I learned to read. This definition includes people—the people I care about and remain intimately connected to despite place or proximity.

      I moved many times in my twenties—often within the same city, yet I also tried new cities, averaging one move every eight months over my first ten years on my own. During this time, I kept certain cardboard boxes that had proved their functionality and showed no signs of bottoming out. I became a master of the homey, able to move in, unpack, set up and host a dinner party within the first two days of getting the keys. With all the packing and unpacking, I began to think of home as “what you take with you when you go.” While all of these definitions describe home in a limited way, none show the many facets of how we use and understand the word “home.” I’m left to understand home as a felt and sensed thing, not limited to place, people and context, but including personal and collective histories, myth and family legend, as well as texture, flavour and a repertoire of sensual experience that produces feelings of familiarity and comfort. At the centre, this is a story of encounter.

      Rathven, Late May

      The North Sea glitters green in the sunlight, smoke-blue in cloud shade. Gulls perch on the wind over rocks that break the tide. Kelp and shellfish darken the shore, pools of tidal life drown and surface twice daily with the ocean’s wet breathing. At my back, the harbour village of Buckpool, Scotland hunkers shoulder to the wind at the base of the cliff that once delineated fishing folk from farming folk. Above the cliff edge is Buckie proper, a metropolis in the remote and rural sense of the word. Two kilometres southwest, a footpath leads along the burn to the village of Rathven. With little more than three roads and two short dead-ends, Rathven is easy to overlook; it was once considered the centre of the region, the root of the parish, the home of the school and the cemetery. It is also where the Elricks lived—James, Ellen and their five sons—before they made their gradual migration to Canada in the mid-nineteenth century.

      I was here almost a year ago today looking for Alexander Elrick, the last Elrick of my lineage to die in Scotland. Alexander’s twin brother James emigrated first, followed by the rest of the family. There are no records in our family history of what became of Alexander, whether he fathered a branch of great-aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins, or whether this part of the family tree died out. The first five days of my search brought me through the library’s microfiche records, the local museum and several cemeteries, yet I had no luck. If only I could find him, I told myself, his descendants or even his bones, I’ll have found the title to my Scottish ancestry, however remote or reduced by the generations between. On the last day of my stay, I took shelter from the heat of the afternoon sun in the shade cast by a simple granite headstone, marking the bones of Alexander, his wife and children, the end of that Elrick line.

      Buckpool is different this time. Even though I’m staying at the same cottage with the same furniture and the same view, it is not the same. I have changed. Time has passed and I see here differently, feel it differently. The stories I’ve inherited (such as the Elrick emigration) and others I’ve told myself only speak about place, not through it, and they speak from a rear-view perspective that reads the ripples in the pond in a way that warps the shape of the stone. This place, like all places, resides in the moment of my encounter with it, particular and fleeting. Alexander’s bones