by Genevieve Georget

Created on: March 09, 2009

When I was about seventeen years old, my Mom and I moved into an apartment on the second floor of a house in the old South area of London, Ontario. Once we moved everything in, I spent the entire rest of the weekend painting my bedroom, putting my pictures back up and arranging everything just as it was before we moved. When I was done, I dipped my hands in the paint and left my handprints on the back of my door. I wanted some evidence of my presence to be left behind. I wanted there to be proof that someone's adolescence had occurred within those walls.

My Mom and I moved a lot when I was young. I can remember six or seven different places that occupied our lives while we were in London. While it always seemed to bother the people around us, I always thought of it as an adventure. While our lives happen to consistently change addresses...home was always where my Mom and I happen to be at that moment. Changing homes just seemed so insignificant compared to the many other things that were constant; we had lots of family nearby...we still had a girls' night out every Friday...I still graduated high school with many of the same people that I started kindergarten with...I still had baseball practice twice a week...we still had a Christmas tree every year and a pumpkin every Halloween. Some things just never changed.

Or so I thought.

In the fall of 1997, I moved to Ottawa, Ontario to attend university and shortly there after, my Mom decided to move to B.C. She packed up her things, hopped on a westbound bus and just like that...I was homeless. Of course, I wasn't actually homeless but, while all of my classmates headed home for the holidays and long weekends, every physical trace of my existence now fit into a top floor bedroom that I was renting in Ottawa's student ghetto. I hadn't carved my initials in a backyard tree...there was no pencil marks indicating my growth spurts on a family room wall...the handprints on my bedroom door had long been painted over...and the single person that I knew to be home was suddenly a world away. I guess that's the thing about moving around a lot; while on one hand, you learn to never rely on your past too much...on the other hand; you couldn't have even if you wanted to.

For the next four or five years, I was living life like a nomad...a person with no permanent home but moves about according to the seasons. I lived in countless different places with countless different people. It wasn't much different than what I had known for most

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