Chinese Broccoli

For three weeks straight I woke up every day in Scott and Lisa's spare room next to an enormous weaving loom. I would toast bagels that I bought at the very Canadian store at the end of the street, drink coffee and pore over the pathetic housing offerings in the Toronto Star. Toronto had a less than 1% vacancy rate in 1998 and I didn't even have a job. I didn't even have a bank account. But I did have Belle & Sebastian's The Boy With the Arab Strap on a cassette backed with Saint Etienne's Good Humour and a new leather coat, and among the growing chill and falling leaves and complete infestation of squeegee kids in autumnal Toronto, I found a beautiful apartment, just by seeing a sign, on the street I wanted to live on. I pulled up to look at it for the first time knowing I had found the place before even peering inside, putting the car in park with my heart in my throat just as the Saint Etienne tape hit the drum break in "Goodnight Jack" and, y'know — sometimes you just know.

I didn't think I was necessarily going to leave Toronto and I didn't think I was necessarily going to stay forever. I feel like that first year — the new friends I'd end up drifting from, or working alongside, or being closer to than ever nine years later, the shops and streets and streetcars I navigated — was as much about learning myself as learning a new city, a new country. I find it hard to believe I outlasted Peter Dunn's Vinyl Museum, or, conversely, that I still rent my movies at the same place I did when I might not have known any better. And when I fell into community eventually — writers, more than the usual musicians I'd gotten used to slumming it with back in the states — it was small and wonderful and inspiring and immediately full of the coincidence I've come to accept as natural in my life no matter where I am or what is happening. I made it home and it made me, in spite, or because, of the fact that I was pretty much winging it.

What's amazing about leaving here at the same time as I arrived is how unbittersweet the sweetness is. If you're not insane, fall is your favourite season: the sense of renewal that is also wrapped in closure, the feeling of reprieve and bracing for winter both. My house is full of red maple leaves grabbed from wherever in whatever moment and pressed into hidden places in attempts to weakly seize this feeling. This year, I fantasized about fall all summer until I realized it wasn't just that ache for crispness and cider and cozying-in but the so-obvious-once-it-dawns-on-you essence of new beginning. I literally stared longingly at a cardigan hung on my bedroom closet handle for a full month before I realized what it was trying to tell me. Fall isn't about hunkering down to avoid the world, I think: it's about clearheadedness and nostalgia coming to the same point. I wasn't just restless for autumn's magic to hasten its crunchy step towards me, I was itching to be right back where I started from, at the beginning of adventure in the total sense. My house is now half-packed and the weather is about ready for me to put on that sweater.

Though I'd expected a shiver of advance regret at loading my last days here with paperwork and ministorage, in almost all senses I know it is the perfect time. The city feels and smells as magical at the end of this chapter as it did at the beginning; I see it with the same fresh eyes, and rather than marking off this month as sad, I feel everything and everyone infused with so much love, my every step kicked up a beat by the excitement of the future and the rightness of all around me, forging the connection between where I am now and where I will be one month from now. And if there's anything the last years have taught me it's about how when you love so many places and people you necessarily need to live life more fluidly: I am not ending this, I am not never coming back and walking and talking and wasting days in cafes and driving down to Cherry Beach late at night. I am just going to be doing it with a different frequency and from a different vantage point. And if anyone's noticed how desperately homesick I am for Chicago all the time and how I just manage to work its charms into my vaguely scheduled cycle, you'll know I'm confident I will pull off weaving these threads in, too.

So instead of spending the weekend attached to a tape gun and an occluding anxiety, I'm up north in the heart of fall, surrounded by the family that took me then and still takes me now, an ever-expanding brood of tiny nephews who stand on my legs and stare and giggle at me, parents who don't mind my only-child tendencies around their home of swirling activity, a Great Lakes bay unseasonably warm enough to swim in impulsively with your clothes on, games around the dining room table and acceptance and twisty golden-green drives that put everything petty and frightening completely aside. I was asked for what I might like today and all I could come up with was cheap white bread for turkey sandwiches, a new can of whipped cream, and, if possible, the cryptic crossword. With love and peace already on your side, sometimes a new can of whipped cream really is enough.

And while in a few weeks I may yet be running around the house so eleventh-hour crazed that I'm making lists of things as basic as "eat food" and "brush your hair" in between scrambling to pack — I can't for a minute imagine having regrets about how I'm spending my last days here, or how I have spent any day of the last 3,238 days in this country so far. Everything will get done in its way, because it just simply does. I for one am going to make a point of enjoying it.