Thankful…

This weekend posed such a dichotomy in my heart that I need to blog about it just to make some sense of it...

Friday afternoon we headed back to our old stomping ground; Thunder Bay. It was a reunion. It was a homecoming. It was a wedding. And it was over in the blink of an eye.

There is something about coming home to Thunder Bay that makes me feel jubilant and yet so settled; every time we go back it is as if we have never left. The conversations with friends pick up without missing a beat and there is a comfort and ease to our visits that is so refreshing. And the town itself - with its rugged beauty and quiet modesty; I am always so proud to say I once lived there.

Rob and I lived in Thunder Bay for 3 years. It was the town we moved to together and shared our first home in. During those 3 years we shared the ups and downs of residency, being away from family and friends back home, wedding planning and job hunting. It was in Thunder Bay that Rob and I became a family.

Our life in Collingwood is everything we want. With the ski hills and the Bruce trail it has the beauty and activities of Thunder Bay without the 17hour commute to family. We have both found our dream jobs and we have a community of friends we couldn’t live without.

And we have Toby.

At the wedding I reconnected with friends I haven’t seen since medical school and residency. I gushed to them in my usual superlative ways about Toby and life in Collingwood. (I even carried my iPhone with me to provide video evidence of my crazy son…yes, I WAS that mom…) And yet as we left Thunder Bay on Sunday morning, well rested, fed and sauna-ed and my voice HOARSE from talking, I felt a strange sadness come over me.

Wouldn’t life be so much easier if you got married and worked in the town you grew up in? Then you’d never have to MISS all of the other places you’ve grown accustomed to, and you’d never find yourself trying to decipher the strange contented sadness that lingers after what should have been a purely EXCITING weekend away.

I know deep down that I am lucky to feel this way; to know there are numerous places in the world I can call home and feel just as comfortable in as my own. It reminds me of a quote I used in my highschool graduation blurb,

“How lucky we are to have loved something so much that saying goodbye could be so hard…”

Thanks for a great weekend, Thunder Bay. We’ll be home again, soon.