I know they say, "You can’t go home again." I just had to come back one last time.
We recently took a family RV trip up to Canada to visit my dad’s family. We had 17 people squished into that RV — eight adults and nine kids ages 10 and under (three still in diapers), shut in tight for better or for worse, in stinkiness and (thankfully) in health, for 14 long hours.
Actually, the travel day didn’t seem so difficult. There was something surprisingly comforting about being crammed so close together with each of our little families. We laughed, slept, snacked, played games, watched movies and talked, talked and talked as the miles flew by. We watched as big mountains gave way to soft, rolling pastures, and then broke into rocky cliffs, cut by blue rivers and dark green trees. Up, up we drove until the hills gradually settled into golden prairies and wheat fields, accompanied by tall grain elevators with the names of little towns stenciled in faded block letters on the side.
This was Alberta.
“Dad, can we drive by the house you grew up in?”
A favorite tradition of ours is making the rounds to the little farmhouses of my dad’s childhood. We piled out of the RV like clowns in a circus car and took pictures of the homes as my dad spoke of memories of sleeping in sunrooms and riding his bike home on dirt roads while his beloved dog, Nikki, faithfully padded along beside him.
As many years had gone by, I couldn’t believe how much had remained unchanged. Some of the old roads were paved and some new houses had popped up along the way.
And yet, the vistas of honeyed land and big spacious sky that seemed to stretch on forever; the un-busied, un-hurried pace of a small town; and the feeling of history and belonging was soaked into every detail of those little lanes we rediscovered. I closed my eyes and wished I could go back to those black-and-white times my grandma had framed in her kitchen hutch.
As we met new owners who wandered out of their homes, wondering who this giant family was and why they were taking a hundred pictures of their home, we were surprised and delighted when one of them invited us in.
“Come and take a look around,” he said.
The quaint, little yellow house we reverently entered was where my dad spent his growing up years, from age 9 until 17. It was being remodeled, but so much of the original 1905 home was kept beautifully the same.
“Look, this is my old bedroom,” Dad said as we climbed the stairs to a sun-soaked room that overlooked a small, well-kept yard with a giant shade tree. “I would put my drum set here. … Oh, and this knob on the railing was always loose from us swinging around it on our way to the kitchen.”
Watching my dad light up as he led us through those old rooms was something I’ll never forget. Miranda Lambert’s song “The House That Built Me” was on repeat in my head as my dad relived and reminisced:
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing.
Out here it’s like I’m someone else,
I thought that maybe I could find myself.
If I could just come in, I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothin’ but a memory
From the house that built me.
I have always loved coming back to Canada and hearing about my dad’s upbringing and my parent’s humble beginnings as a newly married couple. We still laugh at the story my dad told my mom after they got married, how he convinced her to move up north so he could finish his residency at the University of Alberta.
Thinking he’d poke a little fun at the nervous, hesitant California native who was my mom, Dad joked that up in Canada, there was “no running water, no neighbors for miles and moose in the backyard.”
And how, to his utter surprise, the little home they first moved into had no clean running water and was the only one as far as the eye could see on a lone dirt road, and how a few mornings after they had moved in, they spotted a giant moose standing on their back porch, staring at them through the window.
My older sister and I were born there, my sister in High River and me in Edmonton. Maybe that’s why I still feel a pull to that sweet land.
During the Pioneer Day celebrations here in Utah, there was a float that stood out to me. There were several people doing family research on computers. All of a sudden, a pioneer ancestor would poke their head through the screen and give them a hug, like they were discovering a part of who they are.
That’s how I felt during this recent trip to Canada — like I was discovering a piece of who I am and who my father is, and who his mother and father are, and who their parents were. I appreciate them and love them more deeply as I get to know them. I miss them. Several days of homemade raisin tarts, goofy jokes, unabashed laughter and bedtime stories were not enough.
I am so grateful for the opportunity to return to Canada with my family, and my own husband and children. I hope they felt the deep roots there, the ties that bind us together, forever, in every embrace they ran into.
It’s a little sad, how we all leave a little piece of ourselves behind when we become adults and move on. But we also carry the childhood “us” forever.
And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we get to rediscover who that is.
Carmen Rasmusen Herbert is a former "American Idol" contestant who writes about entertainment and family for the Deseret News.