1.23.23 // Leaving Squamish

Squamish* was a place I never expected to call home.
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Spending a week in an Airbnb just outside of town at the end of 2020, the November gloom had me stir-crazy and confused why people flocked to a place where the rain never stopped and seemingly the sun never shined.
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After that week, I nodded along to anyone who said Squamish was a "stopover town on the way to Whistler."
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Fast forward a year later, coming off of an adrenaline-filled chaotic couple of years, I yearned for cozy, calm, and quaint.
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No longer in "pandemic pricing," the home I lived at in Whistler was out of the question, so I started to look at Squamish again. I wondered if maybe I was too quick to judge. I was curious.
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Landing in the first Airbnb slightly out of town, I started to fall in love with the horizon- the Tantalus Mountain Range always just out of reach, the Chief standing proud, the beauty of a little stretch of land nestled between mountains and rivers
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At the start of the new year, I found another Airbnb downtown, then that Airbnb gave way to me finding a dream apartment with those views that started to imprint on my soul.
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I watched cold atmospheric rivers turn into wildflowers and lush greens. Then I watched sunny summer days with warm lake swims turn back into chill-laced mountain air that eventually brought snow-decorated breezes.
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That's not to say Squamish was without fault. But, she was what I needed to recalibrate years of living in a mindset around a pandemic. She was the start of stability or so I thought…
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Over the year I was here, I watched Squamish support old-growth forests, the trees with deep grasps on the lush soil, but it wasn't a place I could truly put down the roots I wanted to. I could only appreciate, I couldn't become, and my time as a tumbleweed needed to come to an end.
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I'm so immensely grateful for this place of beauty and challenge, because of that Squamish will forever be a home for me. She won't be where I lay my head anymore, but she will be home in my heart...
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*The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples are the original inhabitants of the unceded land which is now known as the Sea to Sky region.