Been feeling really homesick lately.

I miss the land of my birth. I miss Prince Edward Island. And not just in the sense of missing my family. I miss the place itself too.

The only thing weirder than saying that is how long it took till I was able to say it. I think that, on a deep and wholly irrational level, I felt like if I admitted to missing the actual place, it would somehow reach out and haul me back.

If you aren’t from a small town. that might sound like total insanity to you, especially considering that my own home town is more or less the entire breadth of the contient away. How could it possibly pull me back in?

Comedian Jake Johanssen caught the flavour of it when he said that he did leave his home town till he was 26 years old because it “took him that long to figure out that he was free to leave. ”

I laughed like hell at that joke because I know exactly what he means. But again, if you didn’t grow up in a small town, that joke doesn’t even make sense.

The key to the whole thing is that every small town is its own world unto itself in the minds of its inhabitants. The town limits are the walls of their world.

And the amazing thing is that this is equally true for a village of 150 people as it is for a town of 10K people like the one I grew up in.

In fact, I would love to know where the psychosocial point of transition is between small town and city. Sure, it’s easy for geographers to slap some arbitrary population number on it but I am talking about the population point where the people go from a small town mentality to a metropolitan mentality.

From my own personal experience, I would say that one major factor that changes a town into a city is when it escapes the “one of everything” business model.

When I was a kid, there was one of everything : one movie theater, one mall, one hardware store, one McDonald’s, one KFC, one department store, one dry cleaners, one old folk’s home, and so forth and so on.

And there is definitely a certain wholesome coziness about such an arrangement. Everyone has the same frame of reference and you get to know the people who work in and/or own each business in your community.

There is also a tidy orderliness about it. It is very much a “a place for everything and everything in its place” kind of feeling.

But it isn’t exactly capitalism.

Capitalism requires competition and my town didn’t have any. If you didn’t like the price of the chainsaw parts at Canadian Tire, too bad, because nobody else sold them. Not happy with the service at the dry cleaner? Wash it yourself then.

Most of the business owners most of the time did not take excess advantage of this because while they did not have to compete on price with anyway, they were still part of the community and had to face all their fellow citizens when they did their shopping at all the other small businesses.

And then again at church.

But some places knew they were the only place around to get things, and acted like it.

I am looking at you, Holman’s Department Store!

But all this began the change when the burg got big enough to support multiple businesses in the same Yellow Pages category.

Arguably, things got a lot less personal, but they also got a whole lot more efficient and they really appreciated your business.

Anyhow. Where was I? Oh right, homesickness. Once more I have started out with tender personal emotions then taken the first offramp to theosophizin’.

I have been feeling homesick for my home town and its culture, and in my experience, there is no form of homesick more potent than being homesick for food.

No matter how cosmopolitan you become, the food you grew up on will always hold a special place in your heart. That will always be the food that the animal part of your brain will recognize as officially FOOD, especially if it’s food your mother or father fed you because all animals learn what things are food from their parents.

So I really miss stuff my mother used to make. Like our family’s unusual interpretation of sloppy joe’s, which was more of a tomato stew than anything else, but which still tasted damned good every Saturday night with mashed potatoes and corn.

I tended to combine all three as I ate them, much to the horror of my sister Catherine who sat opposite me at the dinner table.

I also miss our Sunday meals of roast beef, green beans, and rice. I have fond childhood memories of eating that meal then watching the Muppets and the Carol Burnett Show then going to bed.

But what I miss most, of course, is the Acadian food. That’s the sort of thing that really says home because you can’t get it anywhere else.

So I miss the rapure , the pote’, and especially the chicken fricot.

Chicken fricot is a very rich, hearty, and nourishing chicken stew that I could not love more if I married it. I love it so much that it’s what I think of when I heart the phrase “chicken soup for the soul”, because to me, that’s soul food.

And it’s certainly nothing I can get here. I have checked and it’s not available for love or money online. I can’t just order a case of Campbell’s Chicken Fricot or anything.

So I had to make due at Denny’s last night with chicken soup as an appetizer and getting chicken gravy to go with the chicken sandwich I ordered.

If you combined the richness and goodness of all those three things, you would have some idea of how good chicken fricot is.

And if I want some, I guess I will have to make it myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.