Further Home

Because each of the words family and home implies the other, most of the time, little else needs saying.
My sisters claim to laugh at every wisecrack I offer but who wouldn't. My grandson, more and more into walking, expects to fall forward or arrive safely to where I sit, that look on his face.
Where I sit now--an area of Strathcona, joined in the 1890s to Edmonton across the North Sask (which my sisters and I ferried across last week at Wingard, Sask) but settled orginally by a rag-tag group of settlers including a Metis man, Laurent Garneau, who was thrown in jail in '85 as a Riel sympathizer, his Scottish wife Eleanor grinding Riel's letters to bits in her washbucket as the Fort Edm Home Guard paddled across to get Laurent--yes where I sit now, across from the blues bar on Whyte (next to the former hall where Garneau played fiddle as the settlement grew), I'm waiting for my breakfast, for a few hours to pass, for my daughter Lucy's last show at the Edmonton fringe--Bertha, a wise/sad/sweet half-mask clown/woman whose "bon voyage party" takes her--she hopes, she desperately and sweetly hopes--somewhere home.
Then I had back home myself.
I guess history's a home too--one we imagine, like all homes.