Welcome Home

It’s Tuesday. You know, the Tuesday after Labour Day, when kids go back to school. Mine are at school right now. The difference is that they started in mid-August like most other students in St. Louis. So the Labour Day weekend – rather than having the feeling of being the last weekend of summer – felt like a well-deserved break in an already busy routine!

In Canada, where I come from, Labour Day is truly the last weekend of what is a relatively short, intense summer. At least, that’s the case in central Canada. When I lived in Vancouver, it felt like summer all year round, even when we skied every weekend! But, for those who live in Toronto and are lucky enough to own a cottage or to have an invitation to someone else’s place, Labour Day is special; it is the last long, warm weekend of summer.

Labour Day weekend always makes me feel slightly melancholy but oddly excited, as if I’m about to turn a corner. For me, it’s not about the shorter days. It’s not about there being less light. It’s not about the yellowing of the colours around me. For me, it’s the tide of change. It’s knowing that the long, lazy days of summer are over and the stricter routines of school are about to begin. Even though I haven’t been a student for many years – can I count in decades? – the feeling still grips me.

This year, those sentiments are a bit confused. In Belgium as in the rest of Europe, workers celebrate May 1st as Labour Day, so it’s been three years since I’ve even been in North America for an autumnal Labour Day. Also, since my children already had started school, they felt none of the curious anticipation that always defined my Labour Day weekends as a student. I hadn’t bought them a special new back-to-school outfit, nor did I fit them with a sturdy pair of practical leather shoes, as my parents always did.

When I was a kid, my family did not dash off to a summer cottage every weekend, but I still remember Labour Day weekend being special. It always was (and still is) the last day of the Toronto’s “Ex”, a three-week long carnival on the western edge of the city. I remember playing long, long games of street hockey. I remember kids hanging out, chatting on the streets, long past the streetlights coming on. I remember the days were warm but the nights were cold. The autumn chill would leave a thick layer of dew on the grass out front. Fat geese would circle overhead, endlessly honking out instructions to each other as they practised their V-formations in anticipation of the upcoming migration.

This time of year used to mean something. It meant the end of summer and the beginning of school – a mixture of sadness and sleepless anticipation. For this reason, I was anxious for the family to head up to Canada to our “cottage”, which is actually a condo on Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, just north of Toronto. I wanted to feel like we were escaping the city one last time before the end of summer. We were not disappointed: the geese were noisy and a heavy orange harvest moon rose lazily out of the cold, clear horizon each night, trailing long caramel ribbons of light across the water.

With a full heart, I closed up the “cottage” yesterday morning. As I packed our bags, I glanced out the window one more time and said a quiet goodbye. Later at the airport, I felt strangely detached as we re-entered the USA through the same customs office in Toronto that had affixed visas in our passports six weeks earlier. I wasn’t sure if I’d just left my home, or if I was going home. I wasn’t sure, in fact, if my home was still in Brussels, from which I’d moved less than 10 weeks ago. Then, the Customs Officer smiled, stamped my passport, and said, “Welcome home, folks” and I knew he was right.