We are a city of immigrants, we know, but what does this mean for each of us? Can Toronto be made to feel like home when it’s so different from fill-in-the-blank where we came from? And when we go back there, if we can, is it home anymore? How do we cope with the absences in our lives when we move here? Does the impact of immigrants change our city until it doesn’t feel like home? Or until it finally does? We explore some of the myriad aspects of being at home.

UNITED NEIGHBOURS: a Toronto Neighbourhood welcomes a Syrian refugee family
by Miria Ioannou
Galvanized by the image of a lifeless toddler washed ashore on a Turkish beach, a group organized themselves and sponsored a refugee family of seven. Their story is all about successful community building.

I KNOW HOME
by Alejandra Bravo
A quest to feel rooted.

 

A PLACE TO STAND, A PLACE TO LEAVE? How in the World Did I End Up in Australia?
by Jo Lampert
I was just a little girl living in Toronto when Expo ’67 presented Ontario with the best theme song ever.

DAAD-MOHAMMAD AND THE FISHES
by Sima Sahar Zerehi
In the morning just as the sun rises he gets up…

 

AN IMMIGRANT ALL OVER AGAIN?
by Winnie Ng, compiled by Schuster Gindin
Lose your job and you are worse off than when you arrived…

 

WHAT DO THEY CALL YOU AT HOME?
by Miria Ioannou
The trip was meant to be more business than pleasure. I had agreed to accompany my mother to Cyprus…

WHEN HOME LEAVES YOU
by Elizabeth Cinello
What if friends, family, and neighbours from home, even the ones you didn’t get along with, picked up and left?

RAZING HOME  Photo Essay
by Matthew J.W. Higginson
When you move out of a place it can be emotionally devastating. Especially because, for most of us, it is so rarely our choice…

LEAVING CITY LIFE FOR A HOME IN THE COUNTY
by Mary Lou McQuillan
In 2003 my husband and I left Toronto and a house that we and our children had loved and had lived in for 23 years…

A NEIGHBOURHOOD BECOMES HOME
by Jessica Rovito
I had expected that having a child would affect my view of the city and my relationship to it.

HOMECOMING
by VIncenzo Pietropaolo
With each snip of the pruning shears, a branch of the grapevine falls from the pergola…

HOMES   Photo Essay
by Schuster Gindin

AT HOME IN LONDON AND TORONTO
by Colin Leys
How does living in London compare to living in Toronto? Colin Leys has inhabited both cities over a number of years and has some thought-provoking and amusing insights into Old World versus New World living.