We sometimes take the blessings of home and family for granted. It’s easy to forget how wonderful it is to be grounded and have a place where we can relax and be ourselves, with people who know us and love us. As I get closer and closer to the move to Kingston, the beauty and importance of home is being regularly driven home for me.
My realtor has been incredibly helpful, and has found a huge number of possible new “Homes” for me, and every one of them has both positives and negatives for how they will suit my needs, but that speaks only of the physical nature of a home. There is so much more to home than simply the layout of a house or the amenities that it may or may not have. Over the course of my life, I have been blessed by the fact that I have usually stayed a long time in any place that I have lived, and as such, managed to lay down deep roots among the people there.
Home was first, the town of Tilbury. My first home was in a house that my father built on the family farm. The family had lived there in that area and in that small town for generations, and this house sat next door to the home of my grandfather. It was amazing to grow up in a place where so much family was there in easy walking distance. That was only enhanced by the connection with the small Anglican Church in town where the entire extended family all gathered for worship. Home went far beyond the four walls of the house. Home was a community. It was a company of disciples.
During university years, I lived in university residences and apartments around the cities of Sudbury and London, and there was always that touchstone that while I was here, there was still that place in Tilbury that was “Home.” But still aspects of home grew up during those university years, particularly during the years living in London and studying at Western. It was a different sort of family, and a different sort of community that grew up there, but as with so much of the home life back in Tilbury, it was so often grown up around the meal table.
In my first year at Huron, I lived in the Yellow Cottage at the back of the College property with a couple of other Theology students. We had the meal plan, and so on top of our interactions at the house, no matter how busy with assignments we became, we always went together to the refectory and sat down for dinner, and usually over several cups of tea and a dish of ice cream, we discussed our day.
The following year, I moved out to an apartment on Horizon Drive with Bryan Smith and Bishop Bill Cliff. The community of the previous year continued on as a part of life at Huron College, and the fellowship continued. After three years at Huron, I had reached the point where I felt as though I had two homes. There was the one in Tilbury, and the one in London.
And then came ministry in the church. One warm July day, Bishop Townshend asked me to meet him in a Tim Horton’s in Cambridge. We had a moment to talk before he took me to be interviewed by the people of a two-point parish in the part of Cambridge formerly known as Galt. I was offered the parish the following day, and I began making preparations to make the move into uncharted territory, both professionally and in terms of home.
For the short term, I rented a townhouse on Glamis Rd., but as it was temporary lodging, it really never gained the status of home. It was simply a place to hang my hat after a day’s work. But it wasn’t long before I bought a tiny house on Blair Lane. It was a nightmare in terms of the repairs that house needed, but my dad assured me it was a good solid house, and so the renovations began. They would continue throughout the nearly 11 years that I lived in that house. It was a tiny house, built on an alley, which had originally been the servants’ quarters for the huge old homes on Blenheim Road in front of it. It seemed somehow appropriate for the priest to live in a place made for servants.
My sister Jane moved in “just for a couple years while she went to University in Waterloo” while I was living in that house, and many fun memories grew out of those days. Families of St. Thomas and St. David’s became part of what had become a huge extended family, and that feeling of being at “home” grew up around that tiny little house on the alley. Jane graduated, but stayed on grooming her little flock of vocal students. And as much as that house was a huge amount of work, when the day came to move to St. George’s of Forest Hill, it was difficult to even consider a move, because it was “home.”
At St. George’s, I moved into a beautiful 4 bedroom Rectory, and had more space than I could possibly imagine. But over the coming years, that space would turn out to be an incredible blessing. Shortly after my arrival here, my mom had a serious stroke, and so Jane and I moved my parents into one of the spare bedrooms of the Rectory, where they lived for many years, until my dad had a severe stroke, and they moved together into The Village of Winston Park here in the neighbourhood. Jane and her new husband Derek moved in for a time because their house on Orrs Lake was presenting serious troubles in the building phase. What a blessing it was to be able to take my family into my home, and even though the stroke took my mom’s ability to speak, we still enjoyed many great family meals in this place.
My dad gave me instructions to sell the farm in Tilbury, and a great touchstone of “home” for me; a place that figured prominently in so many of the wonderful memories of my early years, passed into history, and passed into the hands of someone new. During the same time, Jane and Derek moved to a home of their own. Both my parents died, and Jane and her husband Derek adopted two siblings, before being blessed with a set of twins, and the home just seemed to expand to make room for these new additions to the family. I guess that’s just something about home: no matter how large or small, it is always just the right size to hold the important things like family and friends.
A new flock of young people came through the living room at the Rectory on Fischer-Hallman Rd., as Jane continued to teach singing lessons to what were at first young children. But as is so often the case with young children, they grew up. Many were quickly adopted into my family, and I look on their accomplishments with pride as they have become adults. And children of the Sunday School and youth group of St. George’s also became part of this ever-expanding family circle.
Now, as I prepare to move from St. George’s to a new St. George’s in Kingston, I know that it will only be a very short time before that sense of home has transferred itself from that place on Fischer-Hallman to a new place in Kingston area. All those previous homes are still very important to me, and whenever I am in their areas, I always drive by, and let my mind wander over some of the great memories that were made in those places. I drive by because the places can serve to draw those memories back to mind, but the memories do not belong in the static places. They are mine. Even without those buildings, the memories of home travel with me.
But honestly, home is not held inside of four walls. It is something far deeper. Home isn’t even the collection of memories that we develop in a place. Home is a far bigger thing, that although it includes those earlier things, is so much more.