Are you a salmon, or a hermit crab? Either you never leave, or you can never go home.

It’s a phrase most of us have heard, and if we’ve moved more than once in our lives, we’ve probably felt it.

People who move often begin to catalogue places not by geography, but by seasons of the self. There are towns that glow in memory — golden places. Perhaps it was a job that fit our skillset with colleagues we really liked. Perhaps there were friends who showed up easily, with whom we were effortlessly well matched. Perhaps our children were small and hilarious and the days, though busy, felt expansive, simple and full of potential. Perhaps family lived nearby, we felt supported and chances to get together were prioritized, easy to arrange and enjoyed by everyone.

Whatever the reason, something about that time settled into us and because the time was good, the place became sacred. It was home.

When you move often — especially when you move knowing each place may be temporary — the rare moments when you truly sink roots feel like heaven. To fit the rhythm of a place, to stop bracing for departure, even if only temporarily. To exhale.

And when you have to leave, the heart remembers the ease more than the work it took to get there.

Arrivals and Departures

Our arrival at the homestead in 2015 was our 13^th move – we’d averaged a move every 18 months up to then. My sons, in middle and high school at the time, had been packed up and bundled off to multiple schools, multiple provinces, multiple houses. They’d logged more time on airplanes, moving trucks, highways and in dodgy rental accommodations than most of their peers. We’d navigated nursery school vs. junior kindergarten, chicken pox vaccines vs. chicken pox and high-rise apartments vs. rural farmhouses with a resident house toad. Every single place we lived was temporary but every single place was also – with one or two exceptions – an adventure in those early years. Once the boys got older, the moves were harder. I began to look for some place where the endless loops of packing, moving, unpacking, getting settled, getting everyone in schools, finding friend-building opportunities for the children, making friends of my own, navigating unfamiliar roads in unfamiliar cities, finding doctors, dentists, chiropractors, hair salons (hugely important), figuring out how the old furniture would work in the new space, garden zones, veterinarians, music lessons, sports, car service — all while jockeying children with feelings and a husband trying to impress his new bosses — might finally stop.

It was a lot.

I wanted it to stop.

Staring out a cookie-cutter window in a cookie-cutter suburb looking out over a street I didn’t know made Sweaburg Road, the spreading maple trees and even the house toad look generous, golden and warm by comparison.

But that’s not how these things work. It’s normal when the present feels hard – maybe the community isn’t as open, work isn’t as smooth and belonging feels elusive – to wrap yourself in nostalgia for a time when it all seemed so easy. We begin to believe that if we could just go back, everything would right itself. The air would feel easier. The people would welcome us. The old warmth would be waiting, suspended, untouched.

Salmon or Hermit Crab?

Salmon return, unerringly, to the streams of their origin. They are born with the map etched into their bodies. No matter where they roam, the pull of the natal river is absolute. The journey home is their destiny.

For us, it’s a comforting image — this idea that we, too, can circle back, that somewhere behind us is a pool of water that will recognize us, welcome us, restore us.

. . . But humans are not salmon.

Time does not pause when we leave. Those places are not arrested at the point of our departure. They continue to move along time’s stream – children grow up, parents age, friends change, communities shift. New people arrive and reshape the edges, put new rocks in the current. The folks who once welcomed us for a visit may not have room for us to stay.

There is something almost childlike in assuming that a place remains as we left it. I remember running into Madame Paulette, my son’s kindergarten teacher at a grocery store on Bank Street in Ottawa, and the astonishment on his face when he realized she did not, in fact, live at school.

We sometimes hold former communities with the same naïveté. We imagine they live exactly as they did when we were there.

But they don’t, and perhaps more importantly, neither do we.

I think that if humans are like anything in nature when it comes to our homing habits, we’re far more like hermit crabs than salmon.

Hermit crabs know that shells are necessary. A shell is safety and structure. It allows growth to happen. Without it, the crab is exposed and vulnerable. But hermit crabs also know something else: shells are temporary. Shells are outgrown and exchanged, sometimes the fit is imperfect. Sometimes one must be left behind for another that better suits the creature we have become.

The point isn’t to keep the original shell, the point is to have one.

Building Community, Building Connections

Humans thrive in shelter — in community, in belonging, in being known. But not every shelter fits us forever and trying to crawl back into a shell we have already outgrown is, in the end, dissatisfying. It may feel familiar, but it will not fit the shape we have since taken on.

I think when nostalgia beckons, what we’re missing is rarely the street name or the skyline. What we long for is belonging, a feeling of being known, of having roots and nourishment.

What I’ve learned over the many years of packing and unpacking boxes (hot tip: when it comes to moving, if you have Many Books – as a family of writers tends to – wine boxes are the absolute best. The boxes are sturdy and you can pack them full and still be able to lift them) is that belonging isn’t geographic, it’s relational. But it won’t happen by accident. It takes work.

Hard work.

In the early stages, that work often happens quietly, between our own ears and under our own breastbones. We come to realize we must loosen comparison. We have to learn to grieve what was without weaponizing it against what is. We must resist measuring new soil against old gardens. We must risk being the newcomer again — and make all the awkward, uncertain and tentative overtures. Again.

Misconceptions, distrust, prejudice, old wounds — these stand as formidable opponents to community building. While sometimes they are unearned, sometimes they are entirely deserved. Discernment matters. Boundaries matter. But walls built too high keep connection out along with danger.

The place you miss lives in memory, glowing with warmth and welcome. But that version of the place exists only there — in a particular alignment of circumstance; of time, children, friendships, work, and self. Cherish it, but don’t reach for it. You can’t go home again. Humans aren’t salmon.

Hard Choices

I have learned that either you can never leave – or you can never go home. Those are the choices. For some of us, it’s easy to be bold, to up-sticks and go. For some of us, we know there wasn’t a choice – we had to go where the work was. For others, the fear of missing home, of being missed, keeps us within the confines of our original communities. However it happens, there’s no right or wrong, there’s just the trade-off.

We either never leave — or we accept that we are moving on.

The task is not to return to a previous river. The task is to find the shell that fits now, to build a community worthy of being called home.

This is a Living post, a post to share my thought processes, my experience and the philosophy that underpins our activities here at the homestead. It is not a how-to, “expert advice” or meant to reflect a wider experience than just my own, on my farm, here with my sheep.