If it wasn’t for the tree in my neighbour’s yard, I could probably see the hospital where I was born. But while I was born just blocks away from where I now live, I didn’t grow up here in Ottawa. I’m not entirely sure how it came to be that I was born at that hospital at all, since at the time my mother lived in another city, another province. And while that other city was just across the river from where the hospital still stands, it could sometimes feel like it was on another planet.

I rarely answer the question where are you from? by naming the place I’m actually from, in part because most people outside this region aren’t familiar with Hull, Quebec. And so, I’ll usually say Ottawa. Even my own phone doesn’t recognize the name of my hometown; any time I try to spell it, it gets autocorrected to the word “hill”—or sometimes, “hell.” The few people I meet who do know Hull have a certain image in mind, one carried over from the early years of Hull’s existence: back before it was demoted in 2002 from a city to a mere neighbourhood within the larger, amalgamated city of Gatineau. They know it only as a gritty, dirty, almost-lawless place where the bars don’t close until the wee hours of the morning and men openly urinate in public. Those elements were very much a reality when I was a kid in the eighties, and continue to be to some extent. Which is perhaps another reason I don’t immediately identify it as the place where I’m from—because yes, it is all of those things. But it’s also something else. 

One should feel embraced by, or at least welcomed in, their hometown. Mine often made me feel like an outsider: as though, whether because of language or culture or some ineffable reason that I have yet to uncover, I didn’t belong. There were times when I was young that I was embarrassed to admit I was from there because of how it was perceived, and because of how I imagined I’d be perceived being from that place. My relationship to my hometown has never been simple.

I don’t think it’s unusual to have a hard time answering the question where are you from? I’m sure many of us might qualify our answer. Part of the problem, I should think, is that one simple answer doesn’t cut it. Even the question itself isn’t quite sufficient: there are so many ways to interpret those four words. 

Sometimes when I’m asked it, a number of moving images flash before my eyes—like short films, like home movies—and the question takes on additional meanings: what is the essence of where you are from? What happened there that shaped you? What do you remember of it? What have you forgotten? Sometimes the question reconfigures itself to ask: from whom are you from?

And so, you see, it’s complicated.

I’m four years old and my grandmother is helping me put on my snowsuit. Once my hat and mittens are on, I toddle outside to where my grandfather is waiting. He’s shovelling the driveway with an enormous shovel that he pretends is a plow. I watch it fill with snow as he pushes it to the end of the driveway. 

When he’s done, my grandfather scoops me up in the shovel and we go for a walk. The street hasn’t been plowed, and the snow is deep. I let my hands hang loose off the sides of the shovel and draw long lines in the snow. We stop and say hello to each and every neighbour we see. In this way, we are very slow to make it to the end of the block and around the corner, down the next street and around the next corner.

With the snow still softly falling, my grandfather and I turn the final corner back onto our block and head home. I curl up in the shovel and rest my head back so that I am looking up into the falling snow.

When I think of the city, of the neighbourhood, where I am from, I remember the feeling I had sitting in the big scoop of the shovel. I remember the feeling of snowflakes landing and then melting on my cheeks. I remember the feeling of safety, when in other significant ways at that time my life felt upended, destabilized. This was the age when I realized that things could change very quickly and that I—a child—had no control over any of it. But in that moment, none of that mattered, because I was in a big shovel being pushed around the neighbourhood by my grandfather.

It’s a beautiful summer day. In my memory, the colours are vibrant but blurred at the edges, like an old photograph. I haven’t started school yet, so I must be four or five years old. My grandparents are in the house, and I’m playing in the front yard by myself. I’m the youngest child on the street and I spend a lot of time alone. 

While I’m sitting on the lawn, a car pulls up. There are two women inside and they smile and wave, beckon me to come closer. I walk over, tentatively—not because I’m afraid but because I’m a shy child, and approach everyone and everything tentatively. When I’m close but not too close, the woman in the passenger seat says hello. Remember us? she asks. I shake my head. We’re your… What did she say? Aunts? Cousins? It was a familial relation. I remember that. I shake my head again. Want to go for a drive? the woman asks. The driver leans forward and smiles. We’re going to go around the block and then we’ll come back and visit the family, she says. I shake my head again. We’ll go inside and visit everyone after we go for a drive, so why don’t you come with us? It’ll be fun!

I don’t remember explicitly being told not to get in a car with a stranger, even a stranger claiming to be family, but I back away. That’s when I finally speak. I’ll go tell them you’re here, I say. Oh don’t do that, says the woman in the passenger seat. We want it to be a surprise! I continue to back away. I keep my eyes on them as I stumble up the steps without looking where I’m going.

Inside, I call out to say that two women are outside in a car and they want to take me for a drive. My grandmother comes out onto the porch with me, but the car is gone. I tell her what the women told me. Because the thought of them not being family, of them having bad intentions, is so unfathomable to my grandmother and me, we wait on the porch for them to come back. When they don’t, I’m forbidden from playing in the front yard by myself again.

My older cousin brings home a painted turtle that he found in a nearby lake. He keeps it in a small plastic pool in my grandparents’ backyard. The pool is blue, and my cousin has filled it with water and rocks and plants. We feed the turtle lettuce and insects and let it roam around on the grass. My cousin is particularly fond of it. 

One morning we go outside and find the turtle dead on the lawn. Someone has beaten it with a baseball bat. The turtle’s shell is shattered; pieces of it lie in the grass, covered in blood. The baseball bat—ours—is on the ground next to it, splattered with more of the turtle’s blood. We are devastated, my cousin especially. For a long time, he is unable to speak. He is sad, yes, but he is also furious. He vows to find whoever did this and make them pay.

And he does. He finds the boy who killed his turtle, and he kicks him in the head. 

That afternoon, we hear shouting coming from the street. I go to the window and look out. A gang of kids is standing in front of the house with chains and bats and metal pipes. They’re calling us outside. One of my uncles goes out and talks to them. They have gathered out there because of what my cousin did to their friend. But it turns out most of them didn’t know about the turtle, didn’t know that’s what had started this. They thought my cousin was simply picking a fight. No fight ensues.

For weeks, even months, after this, the tension that had always existed between us, the English kids, and them, the French kids, is more palpable, feels more dangerous. I remember biking alone not long afterward and seeing one of the kids who had stood outside our house holding a thick chain as a weapon. We look at one another as I pass him, but neither of us says anything.

This is also where I’m from: a place where, as I got older, I didn’t always feel welcome or at home.

I’m in university and I’ve moved back in with my grandparents. My grandmother has recently had a heart attack and I’m there, ostensibly, to help out. And I do, but it’s also true that I have nowhere else to live. Late one night while biking home from my girlfriend’s apartment, I see a shadow move around the corner of a building to my right. I think nothing of it until I’m passing the building and the shadow transforms into a man, and the man runs out into the street behind me.

I look back and see him standing there. His legs are spread apart, his arms outstretched before him. In his hands, he holds a gun. The gun is pointed directly at me. He’s completely still; he doesn’t say a word. I look forward, pedal, breathe. When I look back, I expect him to be gone, to have never been there in the first place. But he’s still there, and he’s still pointing the gun at me.

My bike has five gears, but only one of them, the lowest, works. I can only pedal so fast, which is not very fast at all. I brace myself for the gunshot. I tense my arms, my chest; I try to make myself small, smaller. I am sure that I’m about to be shot, and I don’t feel great about it. I am young and in love; I don’t want to die. Not out on the street, not for opaque, insensible reasons. Not like that. 

I pedal into a wide, slow curve and look back. The man is gone. I look in all directions, but he’s nowhere to be seen.

I take the same route the following night, because it’s the only way home.

I knew he was dying, so the call doesn’t come as a surprise. It’s my mother who calls to tell me that my grandfather has died. She’s at my grandparents’ house with my grandmother. I say I’ll be right over. When I get there, my grandmother asks if I could go to the hospice centre, where my grandfather had spent his final weeks, to get his jacket and wallet. He’s still there, she says, in his room. She doesn’t want me to be surprised when I walk in and see him there on the bed.

So for the second time that morning, I’m not surprised by death. At the hospice centre, I go straight to my grandfather’s room and close the door behind me. My grandfather is lying on the bed, his eyes closed, his hands folded over the stem of a fake red rose on his chest. I smile when I see the rose. So odd, so unnecessary. I don’t know what my grandfather, with his sense of humour and love of adornments, would have made of it. Would he have loved it, or would he have found it corny? Would he have thought that a fake rose cheapened the gesture, or made it just right? It frustrates me that I don’t know and can’t ask.

I sit on the side of his bed and hold his hand. I speak to him for a little while, though there is nothing I have to say that I haven’t already said. After what feels like a long time but also not long enough, I rise from the bed and get his jacket and wallet from the closet. I take a look around the room and go back to his side one last time to say goodbye.

Outside, I sit on the curb in front of the hospice centre. I’m crying but I’m also not. I’m fixated on the fake red rose. I can’t get the image out of my mind. It makes me smile and frown and smile. I think I’m fixated on it because that fake red rose represents a simple, inconsequential question that won’t ever be answered: what would my grandfather have thought of it being placed there on his still and breathless chest? And if that kind of question won’t be answered, what happens when I have an important question for him, a consequential one? What then? 

I stay outside a little longer, on the curb in the sun, a few blocks from where my grandfather had walked me around in a shovel all those years earlier. It’s the same place—the same city, the same neighbourhood—but it doesn’t feel like it, not at all. Because where I am from is now also defined by this absence. The question from whom are you from? will forever, for me, be marked by this grief and this loss. 

Later, with my grandmother also gone, how I answer the question will change yet again. The city will feel like it has changed again, because I will then be from the place where my grandparents had once lived but live no longer. There will be nothing left to tether me to that place except for these memories that flash before my eyes like short films, like home movies.  ⁂