It’s a blessing, I feel, to be in my early thirties and have never had to leave the Maritimes1. It’s a double blessing to have managed this while pursuing a career that should have taken me out of here, so nearly inevitable that I feel like I’ve managed to trick the universe. With the exception of a strange pandemic-related burst in the last few years, people leave the Maritimes. They grow up here and then they go away. Maybe they will come back to retire. Maybe they won’t ever come back.
How is it to grow up knowing that you’re going to leave somewhere? That the expectation is that you will go seek your fortunate in a more prosperous place? Like Ontario. I imagined myself as an adult, somewhere else. In a place I’d never been and had no concept of. I would go to university, and I would leave. I would see my parents a few times a year. I would save my vacation and my pennies to fly home. I would always call it home, though my real life would be somewhere else. I imagined these flights home as being long and tiring. I imagined myself creating travel rituals.
I would go.
My mother’s family can trace the oldest thread to the seventeenth century, Acadians who managed to cling to the land. My mother grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick, the daughter of Irish-Acadian Saint Johners, who themselves were the children of Saint Johners, and so on and forth. Like her father before her, my mother went to university in Nova Scotia - but unlike her father before her, she never returned to live in Saint John. My mother didn’t end up going all that far, but in a province of people who stay close to home, she might as well have flown to the moon. She would end up in Moncton, after wandering Nova Scotia a bit with my father.
My father’s family is also full of Irish-Acadians, but he has a branch of Hungarians, who arrived in Canada in the early twentieth century. They made it to Cape Breton only for their Canadian children to fan out across the country. My father’s father didn’t go far, from Whitney Pier to Victoria Mines, but of his seven children, only one remained in Cape Breton. One went to mainland Nova Scotia. Two to New Brunswick. The remaining three went west - all eventually ending up in British Columbia.
My father left Cape Breton at eighteen. He went to Saint Mary’s University, where he would meet my mother and where I would be a librarian more than forty years later. He moved around Nova Scotia, he briefly lived in Newfoundland, he returned to Nova Scotia, he went to Moncton.
My parents have lived in Moncton for 33 years. They are not Monctonians. They will never be Monctonians, even if they live out the rest of their days there. I was born in Moncton, but my claim to it has always felt precarious. My relationship with it complicated. So many other people I knew growing up were from Moncton. Their grandparents lived down the street. Their parents went to high school here. Their aunt worked at the grocery store they shopped at. They played in the same soccer league as their cousins.
The rest of my extended family was somewhere else, and that was unusual. Even though they weren’t far, we saw many sections regularly, I could not claim deep roots in the community. We lived in a newer part of the city. We went to the newer school. My parents weren’t from here, they weren’t known entities.
That tenuous link played a part in my belief that I would move away someday. My parents had hopped around the Maritimes, which wasn’t so usual then, and it was barely an extension of that to believe I would fully exit this part of Canada.
I didn’t, of course. But I added more communities in the region to the family list of flitting about. Antigonish, Miramichi.
In undergrad, I took a class called The Maritimes Provinces 1500-1900. HIST 209. I looked just now and it’s been slightly changed, and formed into two sections, pre- and post-Confederation. That does not matter for this. My professor stood at the front of the classroom, perhaps on the very first day but certainly not far after the first class and told us that the history of the Maritimes is a history of longing. Of people having to leave, and always trying to come back - but there’s always that leaving. She brought my understanding to the front of my mind, that leaving was as much part of being a Maritimer as it is to live here. It made sense.
For my first post-library school job hunt, I didn’t restrict by geography. I was ready to go anywhere that would take me. I went to New Brunswick, to Miramichi. The second time, I felt I could make that demand of the world, and focus on anything that would bring me back to Halifax. I had already cheated my fate once, who’s to say I couldn’t do it again? In library school, they were very clear about how hard it was to stay in Halifax, despite there being so many libraries. Because the MLIS program and the LIT diploma program were both here, the market was flooded. Do not imagine you will get to stay, if you want to pursue the job. I didn’t stay. But I did come back.
My ties to the communities I’ve lived in are surface-level. There has always been a practical reason for why I was there. Moncton, because my dad got a job there. Antigonish, because I went to university there. Halifax, because I went to university again there. Miramichi, because I got a job there. Halifax the second time is the first time I’ve actively chosen a place, or at least that’s what I first thought.
I have always, when it came down to it, chosen the Maritimes. I applied to three universities for my undergrad and picked the one that was in the region. I looked at the list of library schools in Canada and picked the one in the region. I applied to many jobs and was in the process for several when I picked the one in Miramichi. I picked Halifax.
Settlers like myself have a difficult relationship with the lands on which we live. At some point, perhaps, a distant ancestor chose this land for us - without asking the original inhabitants. Perhaps we were forced here by others. I have both of these threads in my history. When I was given the choice, a choice not many people ever get to make, I chose to stay. I was ready to go, but I picked the land which has sheltered me and mine for generations. I saw the path laid out, and said no. This region, no matter where I’ve been, no matter how hard it has been at times, no matter the success I could have had elsewhere, is home.
The Canadian provinces of New Brunswick (where I was born), Nova Scotia (where I live), and Prince Edward Island (sometimes I go camping there).
Such a gorgeous read, Alison!
I feel like we have to over-justify why we stay in the Maritimes. Like we should just know that we’re in the have-not provinces and should want to do better. And we’re myopic to think it offers anything more than a rest stop on the path to greater things.
(Clearly this subject hits for me, a Saint Johner.)