Runaway dreams

There is a small red house that sits above a mountain lake. My wife and I have called it home for the almost seven years. The mortgage is paid, there’s a new well and we’ve done a lot of renovations since we’ve been here. Every time we return from the 50 kilometer round trip to town we can see it through the trees from the road and it always makes me feel good.
There’s a comfort that comes from seeing your own eaves and shutters. There’s something refreshing about the familiar air of home when you first step over the threshold. Everything has its place and I feel like if I ever lost my sight, I could navigate this space by feel.
It’s my haven. I would be nowhere else.
It leads me to recall the homes I lived in as a kid. When I was adopted at nine, I never ever felt as though I belonged anywhere and the home I came to live in was a bleak place. I was lost and my adopted parents never did a single thing to help me alleviate that feeling. Instead, the kept me away from Native things and people. I was meant to become one of them. It was a plan made to fail.
I ran away from my adopted home the first time when I fourteen. I was a teenager. I was the only Native kid in my school. I felt crazy there and crazier at home. Everything was such a titanic struggle to fit in that I thought I would lose my mind. I remember spending that night sleeping in the cab of a rusted old Chev pickup outside a place called Beamsville and waking hungry, cold and lonely, knowing I had to go back but wishing I didn’t.
I hit the road again at 15. I jumped on a Greyhound and headed south. I remember an old black man in the Cincinnati bus station singing me songs with a tambourine and how he taught me more about life in three verses than I’d ever heard before. Up to then all I knew of the world was that it was a painful place. I ran away from home because I thought I would go crazy if I stayed. I was beaten and strapped relentlessly and my runaway dreams were about someplace warm, sunny and happy.
I ran away a lot. We lived in St. Catharines, Ont., then and I’d run off to Toronto on weekends. It was the tail end of the 60s and the early 70s and there was still a lot of tripped out, flower power energy and I found my way to a lot of exciting and interesting people. They just let me be one of them. They let me hang around and learn from them and it felt like home – or at least, what I wished it could be.
But I was underaged and was always sent back. Every taste of the world made me crave more of it. It was like it stepped up and introduced itself to me and my home could never be the same again. I could make comparisons and my adopted home always came up short. I dreamed of running away. I dreamed of emptying my savings account and finding a place where a few hundred dollars could allow me to build a better life than the one I had.
See, my runaway dreams were all about the lack of darkness. I’d grown used to bleakness and melancholy by the time I was 16. I’d grown used to hurt, abuse and being made to feel less, unworthy and unequal. I’d grown to used to loneliness. My life was one large bruise. As soon as I was legal age, I ran away for the last time.
These days I have a home that’s filled with light. When I look back at those years in my adopted home I can see the contrast. So I’ve been working hard at finding cracks where light shone through back then. They’re hard to spot but they are there nonetheless.
That’s what it takes to achieve freedom. I didn’t know that at 16 but I know it now. You can’t carry anything when you run so you always arrive empty-handed and freedom is actually being tied to things. I’ve learned to see my adopted home for what it gave me and I don’t have to run away from it anymore – it makes this home even brighter.