Woman travels through Southern Ontario; leaves with pickles, wine

I can’t imagine living in one place all my life – to not have that dialectic of leaving and returning, moving between pasts and present, the liminal space of the highway. My one-week tour of places called home was both predictable and revelatory (revelations saved for later). Quintessential Ontario moments: being back-slapped by a biker, at the skeezy pub ordering a 50 (and then another, and another), swatting in frustration at mosquitoes the size of quarters, the Quebec license plate on my rental car prompting someone to shout “Go back to your own country!” The expanses – of roads, of fields, of skies, of water – provoked a profound inner quiet that I desperately needed to find again. I was overwhelmed, as always, with wanting to linger in the way it was just a little bit longer: the slow-running comfort of familiar conversations and faces with long histories. My girls, my wine. Life carries on with little regard to how hard that can actually be …

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses (John Irving - I know, I'm sorry, but it’s true).

I cried at the wedding – don’t tell anyone (and that was even before I started dipping into the fountain of cosmopolitans). Not at the legally-obliged-to-be-everlasting-love, but at watching two people so dear to me dancing and smiling and nothing but each other, oblivious to the fireworks of camera flashes. Quintessential wedding moment: the inevitable dance with that guy who spills his beer down the back of your dress as he's trying to grab your ass.
Final tally: 1860 kilometres on the rental car, three awkward conversations with my mother, one drunken 4 a.m. limo ride, two pieces of wedding cake, five in-transit Tim Horton’s coffees.