We entered an airport full of masked faces, forms to fill out, and for some of us, Covid tests and quarantine. Dad J waited outside in February cold, for the hours it took us to navigate our way through the airport and back into our own country. 

Just as we didn’t know how to navigate the airport, we didn’t know how to navigate life. We needed to relearn basic skills, like grocery shopping and making phone calls. “It should be easy,” I told myself. “After all, I’m speaking English.” But every social cue I’d worked so hard to learn in China was irrelevant here. I was starting over. And all of this after saying a hundred good-byes and closing the door on the past sixteen years of our lives.

I felt weak and tired.

And how do you strengthen yourself when you step into a new world? A place where everything, even if once familiar, is now foreign. How do you nourish yourself when the ingredients that made up your life disappear overnight?

I’ve heard others say, after they’ve been away, they find themselves standing in a grocery store aisle, crying. I can relate.  For me the grocery store became that path in the forest that you walk for hours, only to find you’re in the same spot again, still lost. 

I’ve come to see that the grocery store highlights the priorities of a society. It’s a visual description of what people have and what they value. It’s the way they meet their most basic needs and even their desires.

After being away, the things that once seemed important to me no longer are. My way of life has changed. Many of the items held on the shelves of a Canadian grocery store are foods I hadn’t seen for years. Some, I was excited to try again, others, I’d forgotten. And where were the items that had become a part of my every day, the things I wanted? The treats I’d bought when headed to a friends’ or preparing for my kids’ birthday parties. The things that filled my memories and brought a smile to my face. They were gone. They were gone along with the people who made those days so special.

New people surrounded me. The store was full of them, yet their smiles were buried under masks and each one kept their distance.

Medical offices were strange places. Chairs were roped off in waiting rooms and I sat alone. Signs directed us to stay apart. The space between chairs represented the space I felt in my heart.

I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to China. I wasn’t ready for Canada. But I was ready for the Lake House, a place so generously opened to us by friends.

At the lake the men in the boats went out every day, sitting through hours of rain, holding out a thin pole. Holding on to hope.

They didn’t know I was there. They didn’t know how much I needed this time. I needed to stand by the window and watch them sit in the drizzling rain. I needed the view of mountains behind a lake. I needed a slow pace for a while to find my way through this maze.  

The lake stood faithful. It was there, waiting for me after each trip to the grocery store, after each interaction with this new but not new world. After each day of letting go of the things and the people I held so dear, who once filled my life. It was there after I’d said my one hundred good-byes.

Day after day, the lake was there.

I was tucked away at the end of the road, in a house on the lake, beneath Bear Mountain, gaining strength.