We used to make a point of heading home to Nova Scotia about once a year, ever since we moved out to the land of ooey-gooey oil. I think it’s normal that as the years pass, visiting your home town starts to feel less like coming home and more like visiting someplace familiar. The deeper we put down roots where we are, the more it becomes home here. As an old friend used to say, “Home is where your stuff is.”

But beyond the gradually decreasing pull of our hometown, the last couple of times we visited Nova Scotia it felt far less comfortable than before, even less like home. It’s a bit hard to put your finger on, and I don’t want this to turn into a post slagging off an entire province full of people, but my last few visits have seemed, well, off.

Maybe it was just a run of bad luck last time: the old battleaxe who lectured me about letting my three-year old daughter dare set foot on the pristine crabgrass at the Public Gardens; the seemlingly endless parade of unfriendly and, frankly, bad customer service seemingly every place we went; the cow-like stares when we tried to get waiting staff to wrap their heads around the idea of my daughter’s peanut allergy; and so on. I can chalk all of that up to random chance and a small sample size; I’m not going to write off a place because of a couple of negative experiences that a) could have happened anywhere and b) happen an order of magnitude worse whenever I’ve gone to Toronto.

No, what’s really been leaving me feeling unsettled is the casual acquiesance of people to having their lives micro-managed. The old bitch complaining about my daughter walking on the grass actually highlights two such issues: 1. The once-lush lawns of a beautiful public garden have been left to go to seed because of the municipality’s ban on lawn chemicals and 2. The odd relish people seem to take in scolding others for transgressing silly rules. On point 1, I’m not particularly against the idea of reducing the amount of insecticides and herbicides in the environment, but surely there’s a safe balance. My father told me how his front lawn, which he had paid thousands of dollars to have reseeded a couple of years ago, has been completely destroyed by cinch bugs. He called the municipality, practically begging them to let him do something about it, and they told him it was tough luck. So he did what most people are doing: drove outside of muni limits, bought some insecticide, and applied it at night when none of the potential scolds and stool-pigeons would notice.

When my inlaws come to visit us out here, it takes them a few days to realize that they don’t have to sort all of their trash by size, colour, consistency, and alphabetically by their latin names — apparently violating this in my dear old home town leads to no end of trouble, up to and including giving trash collectors the apparent right to rip open your garbage bags and leave your trash strewn across your front lawn. That’s ridiculous enough, and I wouldn’t put it past the city of Edmonton to do the same thing sometime soon (currently we have regular trash and recyclables, and the city itself separates the organic stuff which they compost and sell), but what I see happening back home is the elevation of the rule itself over the spirit of the rule.

Case in point:

After eight years of doing a neighbourhood spring cleanup, a Hartlen Point man says he’ll never do it again.

“I will never, ever be part of the problem when it comes to littering, but I will never, ever be part of the solution,” Gaston Soucy vowed during a telephone interview Tuesday.

The Hartlen Point man is fuming over a recent run-in with a municipal bylaw enforcement officer who threatened to slap Mr. Soucy with more than $200 in fines and cleanup charges for having garbage at the curb on the wrong day.

Every spring since 2001, the 44-year-old man has picked up litter from the vacant land that borders his property.

Later in the article, they interview the “regional bylaw enforcement coordinator” (I don’t know why the title isn’t capitalized — perhaps there’s a bylaw against that, too), who is probably only doing his job and trying to be reasonable, but comes across sounding like an officius prick.

I’m not a libertarian like Sporko, nor a conservative like several of my other friends, but I do have a real problem with the bureaucratization of society, which has the affect of turning everybody into an officius prick. And it’s taken over my home town, which doesn’t much feel like home anymore.

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