An ode to my favorite songs

Supposedly, scent is the human sense most strongly tied to memory (according to a commercial for men's body wash, anyway), but I think I can make a pretty convincing case for the power of sound — especially music.

Last Friday, I went to Smitty's in Leduc to photograph the performance of Prince Edward Island musicians Richard Wood and Gordon Belsher. I thought I had been away from the east coast long enough to handle an evening of east coast music without succumbing to homesickness, but I left the restaurant after the first set feeling emotionally raw in a way I hadn't expected — devastated and yet uplifted at the same time.

It wasn't one particular song but rather the whole sound that somehow reached into my chest and wrapped itself tightly around my heart. Images flashed through my head — of summer road trips to the Bay of Fundy and wading in soft, ankle-deep mud at low tide, of kayaking on the Saint John River at sunset, of my mother's house in Fredericton. I recalled the strange day I found out I was moving to Alberta and how my feeling of elation at getting hired for my first journalism job was offset by a powerful sadness that I was going so far away from the place I had come to call home.

As I listened to him play, I remembered what Belsher, a former Edmontonian, said in our phone interview a few days before the concert: that travelling to P.E.I for the first time felt like coming home. I could relate; something about the smell of pine trees in the cool May evening when I first stepped off the plane in Fredericton six years ago told me I was welcome there. Maritime music always, ultimately, brings me back to that moment, no matter how far away I get.

I read somewhere that Canadians have become a very transient people. Despite the hugeness of our country, many of us don't think twice about moving to different cities, provinces and coasts in pursuit of work, education, love, adventure, a fresh start.

This is certainly true of my own history. The other day, my boyfriend and I added up the number of different houses we've lived in throughout our lives to see who has moved around more; I think I beat him, but not by much. We've both lived in four different provinces, in many different cities, sometimes briefly, sometimes for years. As a result, "home" has come to take on a rather flexible meaning.

Every place I've lived has eventually come to feel like "home," even when I resisted becoming attached to a particular location. When I left the Dominican Republic, I cried for the loss of the beaches and the wild beauty of the southern coast, for tostones and fried salami and the friends I hadn't expected to make.

When I left Whitecourt — though I had spent most of my brief time there pining to be elsewhere — I missed the Athabasca River and the local sandwich shop and the sound of trains rumbling by in the night.

The question I've been wrestling with for the past three years — a period of my life in which I haven't lived in a single place for longer than eight months — is how to hang on to the things you love about a place, the things that make it feel like home, and use them to help you get through the loneliness and upheaval of going somewhere else.

The best answer I've been able to come up with is music. As I proved to myself at the Maritime show, I only have to hear a fiddle to be instantly transported back to the happiest moments of my time in New Brunswick.

Likewise, when I hear anything remotely Spanish in flavour, it isn't hard to recall the giddy joy of roaring down the highway on the back of a motorcycle, the deep-fried smell of the propane-powered public cars in Santo Domingo, or the fresh, watery flavour of a sun-ripened avocado.

I am already building up an arsenal of "Alberta songs" — mostly country — that in the future will bring back memories of learning to drive on the winding mountain highway through Jasper, the sight of the fields and trees along Highway 39 frosted with ice after a spring fog, and Edmonton's skyline at sunset.

Sometimes, when my heart is heavy and I can't see clearly past the darkness of my own mood, I put on an old favorite song and wish to be back in what seems, in retrospect, to have been a simpler time. I look back at past problems with nostalgia, believing them to have been more easily overcome than my present difficulties. I want to stay inside the familiar melody, where it's safe.

More than anything, I want to be "home," until I realize that, for me at least, at this time in my life, "home" doesn't exist in a concrete way anymore. It's not a place I can travel back to on a free weekend, but a place I have to find inside myself over and over again.

It takes time to get to know a place and really feel at home there, the same way it takes time to learn a new song. It's only when you hear the song again, years later, and can still sing it note-perfect, that you realize how well you knew it all along.