Finding Home After a Lifetime of Wandering
By: Nikki Tate
Tags: Life Lessons, Travel, Letting Go, Moving, Home

When I was about 16, my father and I sat down and made a list of all the addresses we had had over the years (at that point we were living in Fort McMurray in northern Alberta). We counted 56. It’s no wonder that my mother considered Wand’rin Star to be our family theme song. She’d push her already deep voice down into her boots and do her best impression of Lee Marvin…

Not only did we move a lot (England, Australia, various places in Canada), even when we had a proper home address, few things compared to planning a trip somewhere. Having four children didn’t slow us down much and we made various expeditions throughout the US and Canada, sometimes packing up the cat and dog and taking them along on road trips and camping expeditions.

Our cat, Mischa (the brown tabby on my younger brother’s lap) moved with us from Australia to Banff. The cat eventually moved to Bavaria with our German grandparents after my mother suddenly developed asthma and a severe allergy to cats. Mischa loved to go with us on camping trips throughout western Canada.

Having itchy feet is a family trait which has been passed along to my siblings and on down to the next generation as well. My older daughter has clocked a lot of air miles in her travels from Japan to Iceland to the Caribbean and all over Europe. She and her husband have decided to forsake children in favor of being footloose and fancy-free. They are both off to take part in the Munich marathon in October, after first doing a little warmup Camino in Spain and before hopping aboard a river barge in France.

My nieces and nephew also roam the globe — one of my brothers, his wife, and youngest daughter are moving onto a sailboat in the BVI this week and the other brother and his wife split their time between Tokyo and Hawaii. Another niece is in Switzerland for a bit, working with the Girl Guides. She’s been traveling for the better part of the past year, adding a dozen countries in Europe to earlier trips to India and South America as part of the Me to We foundation’s international partnership programs for youth.

Growing Up Didn’t Mean Settling Down

In the years since Dad and I counted up postal codes, I’ve continued to move, most recently just before Christmas into the second address here in the Canadian Rockies in as many years.

Defining home has always been somewhat challenging. When people ask where I’m from, I’m not sure how to answer. Technically, I was born in England but moved to Australia before my first birthday. I spent the early years of my childhood there and though I have a few strong memories of the place, I wouldn’t call it home. Perhaps that’s because many of my early memories from the land down under are terrifying. Several images that bubble up involve spiders, snakes, and scorpions, and a landlord’s flea-riddled dog. These are hardly offset by visions of the thick blobs of cream that rose to the top of the glass milk bottles delivered to our door by the milkman.

I recall being locked up in a TB sanatorium for several weeks when I was about five, weeping when my mother left and being threatened if I didn’t stop crying. “If you don’t stop that noise, we won’t let her come back.”

At the same sanatorium, nuns in starched uniforms pummelled my back to help me expel phlegm from my goopy lungs. Turns out it was the first of several times I have succumbed to pneumonia over the years, but at the time we were on high alert as an uncle of mine did have TB and because I had been exposed to him, I have always tested positive in TB skin scratch tests.

As our first winter approached we all purchased parkas at the local Hudson’s Bay Trading Company on Banff Avenue.

Culture Shock — Snow?

When I was seven, we moved from Sydney, Australia to Banff in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and there, housing being tight, we lived in a series of homes that ranged from a tiny two-room cabin to a gorgeous Tudor-style home on the side of a mountain.

My artist father and photographer/writer mother were always on the lookout for the next new thing, other opportunities, changes of scenery so even though Banff is one of the most stunning locations on the planet (and a fascinating mountain community full of artists and outdoorsy-types to boot), we were soon off again. We spent time in the north, Vancouver, Calgary, and a small island off the west coast. I roamed farther afield, to Europe (where I met the man who became my first husband), Ontario, and to Victoria on Vancouver Island.

All this took place by the time I was 21 or so, at which time I realized I’d been a bit premature in thinking I wanted to be married and my life shifted again.

The restlessness didn’t stop, of course, and to spare you the insanely long laundry list of places I’ve since unpacked and repacked my bags, I’ll return to the actual subject of this post, which is how one defines ‘home’ when you don’t really have one.

How Do You Define Home?

Given our family history, we don’t really have a family homestead, somewhere generations of us return to every Christmas and Thanksgiving. The longest-running single address we’ve been associated with is the house on Vancouver Island where various of us have spent time since 1996. But that house, despite its glorious views toward Mount Baker, the time I spent running a tiny organic farm there, and the many fond memories I have of family gatherings in that place never quite felt like my home.

I still own one of the very first books I owned, the Daily Mail Animal Pictorial book, a gift to me from our landlord in 1962.

For decades, home to me felt like the place where I unpacked my books. They never changed no matter how far afield we traveled. By the early 2010s (20-teens?), my book-collecting reached near epic proportions. In addition to my favorite books from childhood, I kept every book I ever read for pleasure, for research, or during nearly 20 years of working as a book reviewer for both print and radio. When the word gets out that one is a reviewer, the supply of books is steady and includes titles you might never otherwise stumble across.

I haunted used book shops, garage sales, library discard carts and was the go-to person when friends downsized or left town. When, at last, every wall of the downstairs suite in the Victoria house was lined with books, sometimes a couple of rows deep, when I’d built-in additional shelves under the stairs and in the entry hall, when I’d taken over my older daughter’s room after she moved out and turned it into a library not only lined with books but also with ‘stacks’ that extended back-to-back into the middle of the room I was beginning to feel hemmed in by what had become an overwhelming and unwieldy collection.

My best estimate is that at the peak of the book-collecting madness I had between 12,000 and 15,000 books.

The Cull Begins

It was at that point I decided I wanted to completely change directions, abandon my sinking farm, and go sailing.

There are dozens of potential blog posts associated with that last sentence and I hope to live long enough to tackle at least some of them, but what should be obvious is that there was no way I was going to be able to keep even a fraction of the books I’d accumulated over fifty-plus years of dedicated acquisitions.

The great book cull began, inspired by a celebratory sailing trip I took shortly after I closed down my farm and was released from the chains that come along with managing livestock and planting, growing, harvesting, and marketing all manner of produce from strawberries and garlic scapes to purple potatoes and curly cabbage.

As those books slowly disappeared, one box at a time to friends, local schools, and second-hand books shops, I felt myself letting go of decades worth of angst about not belonging, not being settled enough, not knowing where home was.

Not that I had a new home at that point, but I worried less and less about that as each bookshelf, in turn, was emptied. My sense of home, I realized, was never going to come from my coffee mug collection (also massive, as many schools I visit to speak about my books present each visiting author with a mug stamped with the school’s crest and bearing an inspiring slogan ‘Learn and rise above!’, or some such…) or the fact I still wore threadbare clothes I’d fit into when I first left high school or every page of every draft of every manuscript I’d ever worked on.

I started to sort, toss, toss, and toss. I had dozens of banker’s boxes full of papers relating to the 30 or so books and several thousand articles I’d written by that point. Nobody, I realized, myself included, would EVER want to look at each of the 12 drafts of a novel I’d agonized over for a couple of years. I kept a copy of the book itself and let the rest go.

If the sense of home was not to be found in my sock drawer, my bookshelves, or my coffee mugs, where was it? I love to travel, but I’m not actually unsettled when I do so. I sleep well in a new bed and I don’t mind eating what happens to be on offer at breakfast. I have a terrible sense of direction but don’t fret when I find myself hopelessly lost in a remote place where nobody speaks English. I adapt easily to new routines and generally feel content wherever I find myself, even when in transit.

Not the Notebooks!

Wherever I find myself, I pull out a notebook (or my laptop) and I write, scribbling notes that are often rambling and lead absolutely nowhere. It is probably significant that of all the things I jettisoned on my way out of Victoria, the journals, notebooks, and personal letters are not among them. Not that I think anyone will ever want to read what’s in those, but rather I hung onto them because they do feel a bit like home.

Those tattered notebooks are where I go to remember what things were like when I was pregnant with my first daughter, visiting Hiroshima on the 50th anniversary of the bombing, or wondering what would happen to my mother if we took her car keys away after we received the official dementia diagnosis.

There are lists of what to get from the feed store, what I was planning to work on with my horse in my next riding lesson, and lists of ideas for new books and writing projects.

I can pick up any one of the dozens of notebooks I’ve filled over the years and immediately be taken back to a time and place in my life (for better or for worse) and find myself simultaneously horrified at how much I have forgotten and relieved that it is all still there, just waiting to be looked at again.

After All That, Where Is Home?

If I look back on my life so far, there are two places where I felt most at home. One is a collective swirl of ‘in transit’ memories, a montage of waiting rooms in airports, train stations, bus depots, hotel lobbies, campgrounds, and hostels. In these images, there is a consistent feeling of being at home where I am, deeply contented to be on the move. There is usually a notebook in the picture somewhere, a camera, and often other people — family and friends or total strangers met along the way. I love to travel alone, making random connections or being invisible, the quiet observer losing myself in glimpses of the lives of others.

The second place where I feel drawn is somewhere I lived for a relatively short period of time — Banff and those years of my childhood spent nestled into the shadows of the mountains, solid and familiar. Of the various houses in Banff we lived in, it is the home known as the Harmon Residence up on the side of Tunnel Mountain that haunts me still. In my dreams I move through the familiar hallways, play the grand piano in the formal living room, push open the swinging door into the kitchen and find my Omi there, baking sugar cookies.

There’s nowhere to get a clear shot of Harmon House these days as a large garage and retaining wall has been built at the bottom of the driveway. When we lived there, there was no historic plaque, either. There is now. [Photo: Fabio Lacentra]

We were only in that house one winter, perhaps 8 months in all, but I felt as though that house had been waiting for me. It was by far the largest, fanciest place we had ever lived, but it wasn’t the size so much as the character of the house itself that captivated me.

This was a home with a secret passage so hidden I never found the entrance (despite many hours of tapping on oak-paneled walls). There was a ghost in the attic (and, I firmly believed, the other end of the hidden passageway). It smelled of wartime (though Banff was never under siege) and whiskey (though nobody in my family drank). It was moody and mysterious and when you stood on the upstairs balcony and looked out, the Bow Valley stretched away below us, the mountains framing the views in all directions.

Image: Nikki Tate

How Often Do We Recognize We are Living in the Good Old Days?

I was lucky enough to be aware that I was supremely happy, a state of being that baffled my mother.

“If you could be any age,” she asked me one day as we sat upstairs, clear bright light spilling in through the huge windows of the living room,

“… what age would you choose to be?”

“My age now,” I answered immediately. I answered so quickly she thought I hadn’t understood.

“No, I mean if you could wave a magic wand and be any age at all — a grownup even, what would you choose?”

But I had understood the question perfectly well. “My age now,” I repeated.

She let this sink in and then said, “When I was your age I couldn’t wait to be grown up. Everybody was always telling me what to do. We lived above a cow barn. We weren’t allowed to make any noise. I ran away as soon as I could.”

She stopped talking then and her face set in an expression I knew meant, “that was the war. Don’t ask.”

My mother had spent her childhood fleeing from invading armies hammering Germany as WWII came to a close. All she had ever known was being homeless. I, on the other hand, had experienced a truly blessed childhood which might have been a long succession of homes, but our family was close-knit and caring, my parents’ marriage solid. No bombs threatened us from above, no soldiers stopped us at the side of the road to see if we had any contraband stuffed up under our sweaters — coffee or sausage or medical supplies for family members left on the other side of a border that had not existed before the war. We were not likely to be shot or interrogated or go hungry.

My mother’s experiences were as alien to me as, apparently, mine were to her. At some very fundamental level, we did not understand each other and that moment when she asked the question about what age I’d choose to be was the first time I remember being aware of the gulf that separated us. She could not grasp the concept of someone being deeply content. And I couldn’t understand why, when we seemed to have everything anyone could ever dream of, she was talking about where we would be moving next. I don’t recall her ever being deeply, truly happy being who she was or where she found herself. She was always looking for the next thing, the better place, the bigger, better, grander adventure.

Of course, that’s exactly why I was lucky enough to have visited Singapore and Bavaria, Sydney and Vancouver, London and the Suez Canal all by the age of 7. But it took me a long time to recognize that the real gift my parents gave me was the ability to be at home wherever I am, to be content within myself without necessarily needing to go somewhere else.

Leaving that house and our small mountain town the summer I turned 13 was devastating. It was a long time before I found my way back but, for the first time in all my many moves, when I did decide to return here three years ago, it felt like I was going back to something solid, even though it was with a new fiancé and a stepdaughter in her teens. Nothing was really the same, and yet…

Perhaps that’s why when we moved into our current house in Canmore it seemed familiar. Home-like. A place I could feel settled. As if I had come home, even though I’ve never lived exactly here before.

I’m back in the Bow Valley only 20 minutes from that house I loved so much in Banff. The mountain community here is what I remember from my childhood. It’s vibrant, friendly, artsy, outdoorsy — an eclectic group of people from all over the place with all kinds of backgrounds doing cool things in a stunning setting.

I am comfortable here, simultaneously feeling that I’m in no rush to leave and eagerly anticipating a trip back to the coast next week.

Will I be coming home then, too? Yes, as a matter of fact. I love the coast and settle back into a comfortable routine within hours of sucking in my first lungfuls of sea-level, moisture-laden air. I’ll reconnect with friends and family and marvel at the way the coast is a full season ahead of us here in the mountains.

I don’t weep any more when I move back and forth between these two variations on the theme of home. After all, if we had never left, I could not have returned, certainly not as the same person I am precisely because of all my meanderings.

Perhaps I have needed all those many winding roads, people, journeys, experiences and postal codes to once again appreciate that I am exactly where I need to be. Here, at home.

It doesn’t really matter what angle you choose, the views up and down the Bow Valley are breathtaking.

The stables where I spent so many happy summer days back when I was a kid…