My mom has a house out on Hatzic Lake in Mission, B.C., and it is just magical. It is a place I didn’t really know about growing up, even though I grew up about an hour and a bit away. My mom has lived there for maybe six years now. She is obviously someone who is very, very important to me, and every time I go out to her place, it feels like I’m able to recharge.

I live in East Vancouver, and I wake up at 6:30 in the morning hearing the trucks taking out the garbage and the beeping and the SkyTrains — the noise of a city. Any time I get to go and visit my mom and spend the night, it’s quiet. You can hear the birds chirping, the wind wind-ing. It’s a nice place to go recharge.

I pull up to her front driveway from an isolated road, and across from it are blueberry fields. There are more blueberries here than you can ever imagine. My sister and I will go for a run around the blueberry fields if we’re trying to get a sweat in that day. You walk through the house, and on the other side are the lake and the mountains. She’s got her Canadian flag waving and a dock that leads out onto the water. In the summer, we’ll go kayaking or jump into the lake on hot days. In the winter, we’ll have a fire in the fire pit and roast marshmallows. We often see eagles flying. My mom likes to consider the eagles her neighbours. She’ll come visit me for a day or two to spend some time in the city, and then she’ll say she’s going to go home and chat with her neighbours the eagles in the tree next door. It’s a pretty special place.

Hatzic Lake is the unceded, ancestral and shared territory of the Stó:lō people.