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The Monday Morning Memo

English River sounds more romantic than Ignace. Especially Upsala. Being halfway between where you were and where you are going happens all the time, figuratively. The opportunity to pinpoint this middle ground physically, during a giant lifestyle change is not so easy to jab with a pin. When you can zero in on one location, you puncture that place to the core. English River is where that pin stuck when my family moved across the country.

After many months of contemplation, my girlfriend and I decided to move our family east from Red Deer, Alberta to Belleville, Ontario. The initial spark to move came after visiting family out east one week last summer. The sparkling shorelines and vibrant countryside took hold of our imaginations and refused to let go.

The decision to trade mountains for warmer weather did not arrive overnight. We dove back into our lives. Kid’s soccer practice, backyard campfires and friends to share it with were the colour between our lines. But the east would always shoulder its way back into late night conversations. When a job position became available to justify what our hearts had already decided, I answered yes. Three weeks later my family was taking in one last look at a house we no longer called home, took a collective deep breath, and closed the car doors The engine started, awakening barely breathing caterpillars in my belly. 

We roam over dinosaur bone yards on the first day. By the second morning of our trip, the caterpillars began curiously crawling on their surrounding walls. Endless prairie skies canvased day two. That night the caterpillars cocooned, awaiting transformation. On the third morning, the cocoons burst apart. They morphed into brilliant butterflies, tickling every morsel of breakfast and the thoughts which stirred with my coffee. 

At this point, English River is five hours away. As we hit the road, my family decided, unknowingly with mercy, to take naps. A mist gently coated the countryside as Manitoba prairies have way to Ontario lakes. The hours unfold like it is simultaneously locked on a steel track and yet as brittle as birch bark.

After many miles and all too soon, we arrive at the midway point, the English River Inn. I nudge my girlfriend awake and say we should stretch our legs down by the water. Butterflies have escaped and are dancing an elegant, chaotic ritual around us. I begin with, “We are between where we were and where we are going”. She nods vigorously and with a smile that could collapse cities. She knows we are on the brink of something big. My knee moves down unwaveringly, bent on decision. My mouth moves with words reserved for two souls. She says yes. 

We walk along by the water, wearing idiot grins strictly for those who are floating a few inches above the ground. Where the path ends, I pick up a handful of fallen birch bark and give a sheet to my new fiancé. By the time we get back to the car, the motel’s owner is on the front step. “If you aren’t staying here, find another home for that car”. I tell him we are all finished here. He lends a nod of approval. We continue on, leaving the butterflies to fly free in English River.

– Jamie Brook

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Random Quote:

“There is no great long poem about baseball. It may be that baseball is itself it’s own great long poem. This had occurred to me in the course of my wondering why home plate wasn’t called fourth base. And then it came to me: Why not? Meditate on the name, for a moment, “home.” Home is an English word that is virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility and the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness. They cling to the word “home” and are absent from “house” or even “my house.” Home is a concept, not a place. It is a state of mind where self- definition starts. It is origins: the mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original. Perhaps like others, especially those one loves, but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate. And it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen… All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from the Odyssey and it’s about going home. It’s about rejoining – rejoining a beloved, rejoining a parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things to right after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things, and going home is where that restoration occurs because that’s where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. It’s the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started; all the other games are territorial – you want to get his or her territory – not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here back around to here.”

- Bart Giamatti, President of Yale University and Commissioner of Major League Baseball

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