You're not the ocean, furniture store.

It came to me today. I can't say it was a breeze, because the air doesn't generally move in my furniture warehouse. It wasn't a smell, because, well, nothing in a furniture warehouse smells like anything I'd like to write about. If boring has a smell, it's probably a lot like the smell of furniture.
Anyway, I think it was when the loading bay door opened. The angle of the light awoke something deep in my reptile brain, far from consciousness. The part of my brain that keeps track of seasons and subconsiously remembers successful foraging trips screamed "fishing."
It barely came out as a whisper, but the old neglected conscious part of my brain heard it. Before I realized what was happening, a torrent of old memories flooded my head. Standing on the rocks just outside Halifax, casting line after line into the crystal-clear blue water. Watching the ever-so-subtle movements of the deep brown seaweeds, waiting for that subtle change in direction that meant the tide was changing, and the fish would reappear.
A short wander from that was Laura, my constant fishing companion who made sure my ambitions last summer lay solely beneath the waves of Sambro Inlet. From that my mind wandered to the drive home, and the rotary--a giant traffic circle supposedly arranged for motorized vehicles, but so confusing and misunderstood that it slows the already calm and content and horribly polite traffic into a delicate, gentle nightmare. With flowers in the middle.
Up the road from there is my first house in Halifax. Mere blocks from there is the home of my second girlfriend ever. Two more blocks, and you're on the street I first had tea with my third girlfriend. Three blocks more, and you're on the street where we broke 15 months later. Fourty feet from that, down the same tree-lined, quiet, friendly street, and then down Black Street half a block, there's the two-story home I share with my cousin. We stay on the main floor, and go upstairs for tame dinner parties with our landlords. Within blocks of that, there's more friends, and more trees. And there are memories. And sentimentality. And a big blue-green bridge that crosses the Halifax Harbour, and leads to beaches, beaches, and more beaches.
All this rushed in in about half a second. I could suddenly see myself, maybe sooner than later, on the road, moving west to one coast, and then, finally, back East. I don't know if it's always going to be my home, but I know it's the place I miss most of anywhere I've ever been. I miss the comfort. I miss the convenience. I miss the people. I miss the closeness and the simplicity of the social contact. I miss having to work three days a week to pay for everything I needed, and then a fourth day to pay for drinks.
But I also miss fishing. That simple, soulful profession, too simple to be a religion, but more than enough to be more than a pastime. I miss that. I think I'm going to buy a fishing rod.