I am visiting Ottawa this fall as part of my annual pilgrimage to Canada. As usual, this is mixed with both excitement and dread.

It's kind of like the difference between the memory of those store-bought birthday cakes and their reality. (You know the cakes I mean: the ones with the generic overly-vanilla cake layers, with the frosting that is so sugary it almost crunches between your teeth as you chew, the ones with the almost-neon roses in yellow or pink that are immediately unfair since the corner pieces have more icing and you never ever get the corner piece...) The memory is filled with childhood perfections and rewritings of events and places that make everything lovely, and *nothing* in life is really that. Streets that you remember as colourful, bustling and filled with excitement (magical sweetness and light as air cake) are somewhat run-down and cheap looking or at least nothing like what you remember (sickening, somewhat pasty, and tacky like the cake).

Friends and family, who have become snapshots in my mind (distinct moments in time captured with a smile) have had their fair share of tragedies, joys, and experiences since I moved away and they are not the same as I remember, as I am sure that I am not the same as they remember. (They probably see all of my new wrinkles, my aging body, my sugar-high happiness at seeing them, and wonder at my icing rose laden depictions of my life in Amsterdam which inevitably take over since it is simply too boring to describe the reality of everyday life, which doesn't really differ when you live somewhere long enough. You see, I'm trying to give them *all* that corner piece.)

Time with friends never seems like enough. (It's a middle piece with icing only on the top and no flowers.) I have them for a moment and we talk over just the surface of life for the most part. With some friends we skip through all of that crap and immediately manage to bare the deepest parts of our hearts to each other, but this is the exception and not the rule. It makes me realize though, that short of moving back to Ottawa, I will never have what I once had. That my relationships are forever changed (in some cases this is a good thing, and in others unspeakably sad).

Ugh. This post has become too morose for words.

The Best Part of going home is the familiarity.

• I see old friends and family and their faces are ... home.
  
• I can understand everyone!!! Although my Dutch is certainly improving, I am still far from fluent and so I miss conversational voyeurism: listening in on the conversations of strangers and making my own assessments, judgments and jokes at their expense. (I do this here too, but there is always a strong risk that I have misunderstood the conversation.)
• I know how to get things done and don't have to ask people how to perform basic life tasks.
• Everyone understands me! (OK. This is a long-shot I know. I am random at best.) But at least I do not butcher the Dutch language in Canada. If I do speak Dutch, people wonder at my fluency and knowledge of a language that a tiny percentage of the world speaks.
  
• I get to build more cakes for future consumption.
• I get new (tall) stories to tell people here in the Netherlands. (When I was in Canada last, I had the most amazing blueberry pancakes: they were 5 inches thick with 20 blueberries in every bite and the people there are so nice and the service is so good that we ate for free the whole time we were there if we mentioned that even one thing was wrong and we climbed in the trees that had trunks as large as trucks, and I mean really big trucks, and we could see the whole world from there, and we walked through a forest where we couldn't hear any cars at all only the calls of the local friendly wolves and we went to a super store and I bought 20 brands of deodorant just because they were there.)

I am, of course, exaggerating at the extent of my tall tales, but some of them I actually begin to believe, even with their home movie distortions of good times where everyone is smiling and the colours are hyper vivid where the cake *is* a corner piece.

Here's to cake. And whatever role it plays. I wish you all a corner piece.