What makes you feel at home is the question that opened a conversation this week, and it started with a priest named Father Paul from Tanzania standing in a park with the sun on his face saying, today I can feel Africa.

 

He has lived in Canada since 2018. He is about 70 years old. And on a warm spring afternoon, a single sensation closed seven years and an ocean. The conversation it sparked is about what home actually is when you have lived in more than one place: a dry cedar smell in a BC forest, wood smoke on a rainy day, the cold diesel exhaust of a northern Alberta hockey bus at midnight. Or, in one case, country music you do not even like, playing in a Vancouver apartment two weeks after a move, because something in you needed to reach back.

 

Topics: what makes you feel at home, homesickness, sensory memory, belonging, sense of place

Originally aired on 2026-04-27