[thefebruaryproject]: 4382 Circle Road

4382 Circle Road (Rue Cercle)

The number is the address of the home where I spent the first 18 years of my life. $43.82 is the amount it cost me to fill my minivan in New Hampshire on our trip up here, to my Mom's current home, yesterday. It was a perfect pump. See the video.

It was a short moment on our drive up to Montreal. But it touched off a lot of thinking. My Mom and Dad separated in 2002 and divorced some time later. It was only 6 weeks ago that they finally sold off the house they had moved to in 1999.

72 Dufferin Road (Chemin Dufferin)

It's not the house I grew up in. I've never really 'lived' here. But it is the house that my wife and children have always seen as "Bubby's house." We have come to relax on February break and to take what we want before my Mom starts selling.

It is the contents and memories that we are here to pick over and lay claim to. I can have the china, she's not planning on have two sets of dishes in her new apartment. The hide-a-bed sofa. A leopard print couch. An oddly striking and peculiarly racial lamp. Pee Wee Herman.

But what's really on my mind is the question of where my home is. As we drove over the Champlain Bridge into Montreal I looked to my right, as I have hundreds of times, and laid eyes upon a beautiful city.

That experience, the look through green girders and over the St Laurence River into downtown Montreal, used to give me stomach butterflies of relief and excitement. I was coming home.

So home.

We left Providence and now live in Sharon. Our house is not a home we want in the long term. It's kinda shitty and I can't wait to move. It's corny but of course your home is where your family is, etc... But it's confusing because everybody has somewhere that they are from. But I feel less and less that I am from one place. Montreal - Efrat - Montreal - Bat Ayin - Jerusalem - Potomac - Providence - Sharon.

I'm confused.