I’m Canadian. I am supposed to know an awful lot about hockey. The reality is, though, that I know the bare minimum. I know the basics about the rules, enough to get irritated when people are playing badly and to know when a game is exciting. I barely watch hockey, though. Olympic hockey? Oh yeah, I’m all about that, but it only happens every 4 years. I do also have a sort of irrational attachment to the Maple Leafs. They are the Toronto team, but, you know…. The attachment is irrational because I hardly ever watch them, I’ve never been to a game, and I don’t have enough interest in the team to really pay attention to who is playing for them unless we’re doing well in the playoffs or something. Which brings me to the second reason why my attachment to them is irrational: They mostly suck. But still, I have a fond place in my heart for them. I occasionally wear a Maple Leafs shirt and my girl does too. I like knowing when they’re doing well and feeling a little sad when they’re not. I don’t often browse hockey websites like this NHL Forum but it’s not a bad way to keep up with the games and the buzz around players and teams and such. It takes less time than actually watching a whole game to go to a website and look around at what’s happening. The boards over there are actually sort of hilarious as well as being informative. There’s a whole thread about everything that’s Bryan McCabe’s fault – one of the Leafs players…. The list includes girls who wouldn’t put out, snow, vegetables, and war in Iraq. Also hilarious? The guys who whine about the thread being pointless and that McCabe gets too much grief.

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No, it’s not too cold. No, it’s not too gloomy. No, we’re not buried under mounds of snow. And THAT is the problem. It has been ridiculously warm. Even when it is cold, it is noncommittally cold: Cold for a day or so, and then right back up above freezing. When it snows, it’s pathetic, thin, stays-for-a-few-hours snow. Nothing good, nothing sticky and fluffy that’s deep enough to kick up while you walk. We’ve only had barely enough snow to have a snowball fight with once this winter, and we had to drive up north to have it. I haven’t used my snowboots at all this year. It sucks. Where is winter?

This picture is from last year, when D. could gleefully eat handfuls of fresh snow fairly regularly, although still not as regularly as would have been possible even 10 years ago.

People ask me sometimes whether I’m still homesick for South Africa. For a long, long time, I used to answer yes, even if it was with qualifiers. But that’s not true any more. I could ramble some more, but basically I’m happy to be here, in Canada, in Toronto. It feels like home here, now. South Africa doesn’t have that in the same way any more. It’s somewhere to visit someday, when I can afford it. I miss my family there terribly, the few I’ve stayed in contact with. The rest are strangers to me, I haven’t seen or heard much of anything from them in 12 years. My heart squeezes tight when I think about the smell of sunwarmed dust or the fijnbos after rain… and I’ll probably always get teary from missing the ocean there, sometimes my skin craves being in that water so hard it hurts. But I cannot contemplate ever living there again.

What I’m feeling cannot be described as homesickness. It’s nostalgia and a sort of physical body-memory of the place that makes me want to run my hands over the rocks, have the hot wind fill my lungs, taste salt air and eat warm grapes off the vine… to physically connect. I will always care. But it’s not emotionally home any more. And that is sort of bittersweet.

This summer was full of amazing things and I did have a lot of fun. I saw some lovely places down in Texas and on the drive down. But it is SO nice to be back here. I like holding hands with my wife in public and getting basically no reaction beyond the same vague looks other couples get. I like walking to get places. I like seeing my parents and sisters again. I like this city. I like that the chances of any given person having a gun on them is far, far less here.