The Lemon Life | online magazine offering a fresh perspective on post-grad life.

Words by: Lizzy Karp

Image by: Pink Sherbet Photography

I moved to Toronto during the summer of SARS, the blackout and the garbage strike. My friends looked at me with puzzled and worried eyes as I packed up my U.S. passport and headed north for a University education. I’m not sure if I was more infatuated with books or every dirty and exciting block of the city. After I received the degree I worked so hard for I headed west to my hometown for a break.

Returning home was exciting, comforting and necessary. On the long flight west across the great lakes I saw the return to my childhood home as a kind of prevention – if I moved back during the earlier part of my twenties I would avoid crawling back on the other side of them. I was worn out from school and wanted to hike in the canyons I had romanticized over pints in quiet bars.  I hoped to reconnect with my mom and dad after prolonged months of separation. I ached to read, think and write for fun. Being home was comforting and lovely and I needed some space to think about where to begin to lay scaffolding for my own home.

After a few weeks it began to feel like I had retired from a great career I had yet to even start. Salt Lake City was quieter than I remembered as most of my friends were either married, making babies or still away.  Early mornings were spent with my mom, hot coffee and newspaper in hand. I wore the same baggy jeans every single day, the pair I adored in grade ten. My liver dried up. I spent less time in front of the computer and more time playing in nature. Patching the driveway with my dad ate away a whole day. I was hungry for dinner at six. The cities hectic pace had slowed to a leisurely stroll, making my life feel like an extended afternoon nap.

My parents opened their arms and fridge to me. But quality time with my parents was speckled with questions about my future and anxious advice. Although thrilled to have a child at the dinner table, their routines continued unchanged.  They had moved on with their lives as empty nesters. The exercise and feeding schedule for the two slobbery bassethounds ran the day. Episodes of Summer Heights High were saved on Tivo while Boston Legal was not. Returning home revealed that my parents were ready for me to leave.

As babies our entire life is our home, as teens we are sneaking out of them, and as young adults we are crawling back. Not everyone returns home the same way, but it’s the nomadic nature of young adulthood that attracts us to the idyllic settled home of our youth. For many Lemon Lifers it’s difficult to create our own home after only knowing the comforts of childhood and university. Some people return home sick with nostalgia and aching to relive the feelings of safety and security. Some people move home after being away for the brief years of university, ready to start their life where they left it. Everyone’s relationship to home shifts as they wrestle the memories that tag along while beginning to build a new life.

During my time in Salt Lake City I held two homes back to back. I’d weave my way up the spine of the canyon and began to miss the glass walls of Bay and Bloor. I biked with the giant desert sky overhead and thought of steering my old rusty bike through the market, coffee in hand. Some quiet nights I longed to be dancing in a dirty basement on Queen Street the way I would yearn for night skies charged with stars. I needed the stillness, the earthen days to drive me back to the city and that is exactly what I did. But more than anything I learned that the definition of home is not a contained one. For Lemon Lifers traveling across the world, bouncing from apartments, or moving back in with parents it has to be small and portable. Home is the book in your hands or what’s in your pocket.

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