{Here and Home Are Not the Same}

I'm sitting up in bed with my back propped up against the wall by two plush pillows. It's quiet in my house, except for the dishwasher that's running a full cycle of dirty dishes--we had shrimp tacos for dinner tonight, in honour of Cinco de Mayo, and I dirtied a lot of dishes in preparation. [Nobody I know even mentioned the holiday today, but if I had been back home, it would have been a non-stop fiesta. Maybe Canadians are separated by one too many borders to recongnise Mexican holidays.]

It's calm here--there are no kids screaming protests about bedtime, no yapping dogs or meowing cats. No attachments. Everything is just the way I like it.

In the background, I can hear the familiar sound of sirens--probably police officers on an important call. Probably they'll save someone's life tonight. Without realising what I'm doing, I begin to worry for their safety. A lot of people I care about work in law enforcement--I pray they are protected tonight, as they go about their duties protecting me.

Then suddenly it hits me: those sirens I hear, the ones that seem so familiar to me, can't possibly be real. I live in Mayberry, after all--a tiny town of not quite 3,000 residents. There's not even a stop light in Mayberry. Here, we have two police cars, and I don't think either of them are equipped with sirens--no need for anything ostentatious like that. (My husband will probably dispute this claim. Probably he will feel insulted that I don't think his town's police cars come with sirens. But I don't mean any indignities, Poor Kyle. I'm just trying to make a point.) At any rate, the noise must be coming from the basement, where Poor Kyle is playing some auto-wrecking blather of a game.

It is shocking to me, the realisation that sirens sound familiar in my ears. As a kid, I fell asleep to their steady humming. Up and down they went, occasionally harmonised by my dog's impatient howls--Sampson hated sirens. Sirens didn't scare me, though--I found them reassuring. The knowledge that help was on the way--on the way to someone who needed it--was comforting to me.

It seems like I could have lived and died and lived again in the time that has passed since I've heard a real siren. I don't hear them here in Mayberry, because the only criminals are bored teenagers out looking for variety. [Oh, and evidently there are a lot of white-collar criminals in this town, too, who get put away on charges of fraud and embezzlement. But those are the kind of crimes that simply require a search warrant and a testimony--no sirens. And anyway, we don't talk about them, except behind closed doors. Certainly not on the internet for all the world to read.] I like it here; don't get me wrong. But I also like home. Here and home are not the same to me, and they might never be.

I'm really looking forward to my trip home this month; I will eat authentic Mexican-American food (not the rubbish I dish out in my kitchen), and once again be lulled to sleep by the sound of sirens, if even for a few short weeks.