1. Appreciate the ones you’re with. 

This post will be short but sweet. My family is pretty awesome, and we try to make the best of the time we have together once or twice a year. My parents are well-settled out on the East Coast of Canada, but my siblings and I, well… we’ve lived in a few places over the past 5 years or so: Montreal, Strasbourg, Charlottetown, Vienna, Lennoxville, Berlin, Sackville, Toronto.

It’s not quite what many Maritime families do – they stick around, build houses nestled into the same hillsides as their parents. (To be fair, we aren’t Maritimers born and bred. And my friends in Winnipeg tend towards this life as well.) I guess the city life calls to us in a way we can’t ignore, at least not for now. And honestly, it’s not like there are jobs tumbling down on everyone’s heads and into luxurious piles out there. So, Toronto is the city I call home at the moment.

But what I’m getting to – what was really the most important about this week in Miami with my family – is that it doesn’t matter if it’s only once or twice a year that I get to see them. It’s a bond that transcends distance. That being said, getting the chance to hang out with them for a whole week – and re-remember all of our jokes that stretch over years and into decades – was the best. Miami was just an incredibly beautiful backdrop to that reconnection.

They are my true home, wherever they are at any given moment, no matter how near or far. And I wouldn’t trade that love for anything.

Thanks for reading my Miami Countdown list! On to new things now…