I grew up just outside a mid sized city in Southwestern Ontario. The Forest City. “Central Canada”. The summers were so very hot and humid and the winters full of snow squalls with snow days. I grew up thinking it was the best place in the world with no ambition to ever leave.
In my mid to late 30s, married with three kids, life changed for us. With the loss of jobs and choices to be made, my husband joined the military at the age of 38 and we packed up our 3 kids and moved away from all of our family and friends and headed West to Victoria, BC. When we left, we said we would be back, with a dream of retirement in northern Ontario, the place where we spent every summer camping and fishing for pickerel, kids in tow searching for Big Mamma and Big Papa in the lake marshes, where chipmunks regularly ate peanuts off of their laps.
I spent my first “winter” here, my husband away sailing with the Navy, laughing over snow storms that shut the city down. I recall my eldest daughter waking up on her 13th birthday crying “what do you mean its a snow day?”, exasperated that this was considered a snow day, schools were shut down and that she could not spend this milestone birthday at school with friends. The next winter saw no snow (but yes, much rain) and a new found appreciation for Victoria with a new retirement plan brewing that did not include humidity, black flies, mosquitoes and sadly, thunder storms.
We live here on the west coast now, with a reference in the military that “east” now is everything east of BC, which now includes my hometown in Southwestern Ontario.
What the west coast did introduce us to was (and this will probably show how small and unexposed to the world we really were):
- Eggs Benedict
- Avocado (including avocado toast)
- Dungeness Crab
- Muscles and Clams
- Craft Beer
- Shafts
- Rogers Chocolate, and
- more blackberries growing on the side of the road than I could ever reach and pick in a lifetime,
just to name a few.
16 years later and moving West was still the best move we could have ever made. We continue to miss our friends and family who when we first settled here asked us if there were side walks, street lights or Walmart’s in Victoria (because we could not locate a Taco Bell or East Side Mario for hundreds of KMs) and asked us exactly what that thing was we now enjoyed every Christmas morning for the breakfast tradition (ie Eggs Benedict).
We miss and love you all.