You can’t go home again, runs the old saying, meaning that — try as you might — you can’t precisely recreate the past, which has gone forever.
Oh, you can try, but the results are often bittersweet, simultaneously bringing back happy memories while reinforcing the fact that those days have fled. This happened to me in 1989, when I revisited the property on the shore of Skaha Lake in Okanagan Falls that my maternal grandparents owned for many years.
As a child I spent many happy summer days at “the lake,” as we called it. The property contained fruit trees of every variety, so there were apricots, peaches, pears, and apples to be picked warm from the tree (when the prune plums, last to ripen, were ready, it was a sure sign that school days were just around the corner). There were raspberries, and wild asparagus, and Grandpa’s cherished tomatoes, juicy and sweet and bursting with flavour.
There was swimming in the lake, rides in Grandma’s trusty rowboat, the Siesta, little frogs to be found lurking in the dark corners of the boathouse. There were trips to the Dairy Queen in Oliver (our eyes peeled for Bighorn sheep around Vaseux Lake), quail tracks to be followed in the sand, walks with Grandpa to the Red and White grocery store to buy penny candy. There was a gaily-painted Chinese junk moored off a property near Penticton, and a carved wooden statue of a Sasquatch lurking between the rows of trees in an orchard near Gallagher Lake, both of which I was always keen to spot.
In short, it was a paradise, but alas: Grandma and Grandpa sold it in the early 1970s. Between then and 1989 I never had occasion to visit OK Falls, but I was there in 1989, when I stopped by the property on a whim, and the owner kindly invited me in to see the place. It was the very definition of bittersweet, with ghosts of memories crowding round at every step.
On May 3, bittersweet memories were very much to the fore at the opening of the new Lytton Chinese History Museum. I was at the opening of the original museum in May 2017; a happy occasion in a year that had been marked by several tragedies in the area. The search was still ongoing for Cache Creek fire chief Clayton Cassidy, and while no one yet knew it, the Elephant Hill wildfire was only a few weeks away.
Later on, I looked back on the opening of the Lytton Chinese Museum as about the last purely happy event of 2017, a beacon of light and hope in a year best summed up as an annus horribilis, to quote Queen Elizabeth II. Then, of course, came the Lytton Creek fire of June 30, 2021, which destroyed the museum, along with 90 per cent of downtown Lytton, killed two people, destroyed properties in the surrounding area, and raged on for weeks.
When I stepped into the new museum on May 3, memories of the first museum and that happy day in 2017 were very much to the fore, and past and present mingled and overlapped in a way that made me catch my breath. The museum was new but felt familiar, simultaneously strange and comforting, and for a moment the eight intervening years were gone and it was 2017 again. The same Buddhist monks were there to give a blessing, the same Lion Dance team was there to perform. But the trees were gone, and most of the buildings, and some faces were sadly missing.
All the happiness of that long-ago day was mixed with the knowledge of what had happened since, and I cried; whether out of sadness for what was gone, or happiness for what had been lovingly re-created, or some mixture of the two, I can’t say. You can’t go home again, but perhaps sometimes you can visit for a few precious moments, if your heart can bear it.
