Both my parents immigrated from Germany before meeting and marrying each other.

When I went back on my own in the late 80s, I got the most disconcerting feeling of being somewhere that was simultaneously intimately familiar while also being completely foreign.

Even just walking through the countryside gave me an indescribingly aching feeling in my chest, like I wanted to lie down in the tall grass and become one with the land and bind myself to it like some giant oak tree. Even the small villages with homes that often were a thousand-plus years old gave this impression of disturbingly compelling and eternal intimacy, and It absolutely freaked me out because I couldn’t understand it.

In all the places I have physically been, I have only ever felt something familiar in one other place: Vancouver Island in the Nanaimo region.