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It’s been a few months since I moved back to British Columbia from Ontario.

I don’t have a place to live yet (currently crashing at a friend’s place, thanks to her kindness), but it feels right. And, more importantly, it feels like home.

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I first came to BC over five decades ago, shortly after I graduated from Concordia University in Montreal. I started my first teaching job at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, first worked as an environmental consultant in Richmond, met my husband-to-be in Vancouver, wrote and published my first novel in Delta and raised my son in the village of Ladner, overlooking the Fraser River Estuary. I have deep nurturing roots here with family and friends. And wonderful memories.

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As the seasons progress, I find that I do miss aspects of Ontario. I left behind a rich environment that closely reflected where I’d grown up as a kid, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec: the cold crisp snowy winters and colourful windy autumns of maple-beech forests. These feel like home too. I spent many days driving the country roads of the Kawarthas without a map, looking for adventure and a cup of good coffee at the end of it. In winter, I walked every day through knee-deep snow in magical forests, snow glinting under the moonlight. I frequented several favourite forests over the seasons, some old-growth like the Catchacoma old-growth hemlock forest, the Mark S. Burnham Maple-Beech-Hemlock-Cedar forest, the pine-cedar mixed forest of Jackson Creek, the Trent Nature Sanctuary cedar-pine mixed forest and the South Drumlin Maple-Beech forest. These, I will miss. They were a life-line to a sacred and holy part of my existence.

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I am building new memories of this new-old home, with more mature eyes and mind. When I left BC 15 years ago after my divorce, and son at university, to find adventure across Canada (I spent several years on the east coast in Nova Scotia), I finally settled in Ontario, where I found fulfillment teaching at the University of Toronto. It was there, in Ontario, where I honed my ecological knowledge and rekindled my love for lichen and fungi. I immersed myself in their study and rediscovered a fascinating miniature world. I studied trees with more diligence, identifying virtually all the key species in the Carolinian forests I visited—and the lichens that grew on them and around them. I’ve become something of an expert in lichenology, able to identify many of the species I encounter, and understand their complex and fascinating ecology.

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p.s. When you know what to look for, you will see it; not before. That’s likely a tautology; but I found that it has applied to me over the years. And nowhere has it been more obvious to me than in my travels across Canada. My first trip across Canada was five decades ago, as a young sprite, heading west to do her PhD. I went by train and, though I saw much beauty, it passed me at speed. When I drove east to the coast, I recall lots and lots of trees, little else. But, my recent trip west from Ontario was landmarked with a new knowledge and appreciation for so many more layers of my environment; it became eye-opening. What I’d only remembered in the past as “so many trees”, had become a fractal journey through boreal layers. I saw so much! I discovered so many ‘friends’, lichens, trees, rock formations, environments that I’d identified in my previous adventures. I became excited by it all. I was in a constant state of wonder. This was how I needed to see Canada. With a wide-open mind and the spirit of adventure.

I look forward to re-immersing myself in these coastal BC ecosystems with that same new understanding, and better informed eyes and mind.

Let it be.

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