I did something I haven’t done in a while tonight. After babysitting for Gruff and Bravo and having my typical 45 minute chat with their mum afterwards, I stopped at the grocery store for tomato juice and a few packs of gum. On the way home I decided to make a last minute detour through some of the back roads through Boyce Park. I took one of the shorter back roads, painfully aware of the gas I was wasting, but just feeling like a random ride through the dark was needed. I pretty much stopped taking these random rides once I moved closer to the city, so it’s been at least two years since I had a dark, quiet ride through a network of back roads in rural suburbia. Tonight while I was driving I could smell outside drifting into the window: nature, dirt, the trees, the faint scent of wild scallions. Over each rise in the road I knew where to look for deer in the dark. I started to wonder if the night time smells in the woods in Belgium are at all the same as the ones that I’m so familiar with here. Funny how I wasn’t even aware that the smell of dirt and trees could be familiar to someone like me. But it is and I wonder if I’ll notice the differences when I move. What will it be like to have no idea what’s over the next rise; to not know where to look when I’m in the dark? All my life I’ve never strayed so far that I couldn’t always turn right around and come back home; back to an actual chunk of geography that I’ve come to know by heart, to where the very smell in the air brings me comfort late at night.

There’s that old adage: “home is where the heart is.” And the thing is, a big big chunk of my heart is definitely no longer here. And sometimes I have moments like tonight where my mind wanders while I steer myself through the darkness and I wonder how exactly things are going to be on the very first morning that I wake up in my new home. And then I think about who I’ll be waking up with, and all the questions and worries disappear.

“whatchoo lookin’ at fool?”