Blackberry Jam, The Way I Like It
Illustration by Christina Wang
During most evenings in our semi-tidy student house, my housemate Keelin and I find ourselves sitting at the kitchen table groaning about schoolwork and how homesick we are. This has always been the case - since we met in first year, Kingston, Ontario has been our punching bag at the end of a bad day. We discuss how buses take hours to come, how the sidewalks are almost never shovelled after a snowstorm, and how jealous we are of friends who live in larger cities where things are actually happening.
Four years on, only a couple months out from graduating, not much has changed.
Living away from home was my choice to make and there are certainly many positives. I can sleep in until an embarrassing hour and leave my clothes in a pile on the floor that no one can yell at me for. I can cook myself an incredibly lavish 3 course meal, or I can just gnaw on a carrot because the thought of cooking AND doing readings is too much for my brain to handle at that moment.
Yet, after a good week where I feel on top of everything in my life, I’ll wake up on a Sunday morning where the sound of my roommates chatting in the kitchen almost sounds like my sisters, and I still feel that same out-of-place feeling I was met with on my first night alone in Leggett Hall back in first year. Suddenly, my bed sheets don’t smell exactly like my sheets from home. I can’t hear the branch of the pine tree lightly tapping my window, because that pine tree that sits outside my room at home in Vancouver. I go into the kitchen and feel a pit in my stomach when the cupboards don’t have blackberry jam and sourdough bread from the grocery store at home, just 5 minutes from my house. I don’t get to eat it while sitting on the sofa by the window, because we don’t have a sofa by the window here. I don’t get to watch the neighborhood people go by, and hear the familiar door creak when my dad gets back from his morning run.
These days have occurred time and time again while at university. There is nothing that can be done to stop them, and I’m okay with that. Missing home means that I am lucky enough to have a home worth missing. Some of these days are admittedly harder than others, but I have noticed that perhaps now they are not so dark. Against all odds, I have created a home here, too. Maybe we don’t have a sofa by the window, but I have a special route I take home from campus everyday, just to pass by the house with stained glass windows that I’ve always admired. Sometimes Metro doesn’t stock Blackberry jam, and sometimes even when they do, it doesn’t taste or look the way I like it. But sometimes that is made up with sitting at the kitchen table, giggling over the UberEats app every time we order obscene amounts of Kinton Ramen in the wee hours of the night. I’m lucky enough to enjoy a walk to Chit Chat Cafe along the lake path, and be greeted by the same lady behind the counter every time with a smile and a “whatcha need, kiddo?” In the warmer months, I will sit on a rock by the pier and listen to Fontaines D.C., pretending I’m the romantic lead in a drama-filled TV show. I always wonder what Wolfe Island is like - though I imagine it’s not too different to Kingston - with their sprawling display of windmills and shoreline trees that paint the horizon orange in October. In the winter months, though I will suffer through to their bitter ends, I will occasionally swell with a child-like wonder when the soft snow sparkles in the streetlights. We don’t really ever get snow in Vancouver, and although walking to class in a blizzard is a deeply painful experience that I won’t miss, I’m now strangely glad it’s an experience I have.
Maybe all of this is my own fourth year digging-my-heels-in-because-change-is-scary talk, but I think it’s important to recognize growth in this way. Over four years, it has now been instilled in me that life comes from you, not at you. Hard to hear, and I will be the first one to tell you that yeah, sometimes life just actually sucks. University is a set of the most unimaginable challenges that have definitely broken me down time and time again. Yet, I’ve faced them. Yet, I’m now realizing I don’t regret any of the hardships I faced here. It is perfectly fine to miss home and all the things that you cannot have while away. Vancouver remains my favourite place on Earth. But I am finding it is also important to cherish places that are new and different. Different used to connote homesickness to me. Different was all the ways that Kingston was not Vancouver. But now, different is all of the things I have made my own, and all of the ways that I have found that I am able to live life. As humans, we create little dwellings everywhere we go, without noticing it, and out of necessity. We so often say “it takes a village” that I would like to add, it is also important to be a part of that village. Take note of any good thing, no matter how small. Carve out your own little intricacies and unique interests in your day-to-day life, and you may start to realize how possible it is for the grass to be green everywhere.
