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We have just returned from an autumn visit to our children in Ontario. It was a beautiful drive along the shore of Lake Superior where a stunning display of golds and reds and dark greens contrasted with white trunks of birch.

Whenever we take this trip to Ontario, going the Canadian way instead of the American, a song I learned in Grade 3 as a new Canadian hums through my head and I have to sing it:

Land of the silver birch

Home of the beaver

Where still the mighty moose
Wanders at will
Refrain: Blue lake and rocky shore

I will return once more
Boom-diddy-ah-da, boom-diddy-ah-da, boom-boom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zDTdKRqZ9g

This Canadian folk song dates from the 1920s and is a romanticized version of nature and the land from the perspective of an Aboriginal person (Wikipedia).

Our daughter and her family in Heidelberg, Ontario (with four children aged 9-15) have moved from a turn-of-the-century farmhouse to a bungalow just down the road. They were in the throes of moving when we arrived. It reminded me of the moves our family made as I was growing up.

When we were still homeless refugees in Germany, fleeing the Russians by constantly moving from the northeast to the southwest, one of my earliest childhood memories is not that of a home; rather, it is that of my mother singing a German children’s song to us, comparing an apple to a house (In meinem kleinen Apfel ). The five rooms in the house are the little pockets that hold the seeds and the seeds are the inhabitants of the house. They dream of the sunshine and of some day hanging on a lovely Christmas tree:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g0TPzqqaZM

My mother was yearning for a home of our own when she sang that song to her children and imagining what it would be like to celebrate Christmas with her family in peace and harmony. We, her little ones, felt her love and care and that was home enough for us.

I was four years old when we settled into the first home I can remember, in the Paraguayan Chaco. This house did not have five rooms as the apple does for its seeds. It was made of mud and brick and had a thatched roof. My mother longed for something better for her family. She wanted a house with several rooms and a Christmas tree in December, with real apples hanging from it. We had one straggly tree in our yard and there were no apples.

Our small adobe hut in Paraguay. I am seated on the right.

When we first settled in Alberta in October of 1952, we were six siblings with a seventh due in January. Our first home was a two-story farmhouse in the country that we rented for most of that year, near a school within walking distance. We were there for about nine months and then we moved to the nearby town of Didsbury where my father found employment in a creamery. We rented another large house for the rest of that year, then moved across the street for a few months to a bungalow, much too small for our growing family. Finally, Dad bought a house just down the street; our family lived there for the next ten years or so before moving to Winnipeg. They bought a bungalow in North Kildonan and stayed there for the rest of their lives. I lived in that house four years.

Following our marriage, we too made our home in several different countries: Elkhart, Indiana; Brussels, Belgium; Kikwit and Kinshasa, Zaïre/Congo; Kitchener, Ontario; and back to Winnipeg for our retirement years. The difference from the experience of our parents is that we moved by choice. I'm so thankful for that, and for the freedom we have had to make these choices.

As I was thinking about home and homelessness, it occurred to me that the people about whom the song Land of the Silver Birch was written, the original inhabitants of our country, were forced from their homes by fellow Canadians to live in places not of their choice and made to attend schools where their identity was taken from them. We need to remember this and work at making sure that Canada gives freedom of choice to all Canadians.