Neil Young's childhood home

Neil Young spent part of his childhood in Omemee, a small town in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario, after his family moved there from Toronto in the early 1950s. His father Scott Young was a journalist and sportswriter, and the family lived in Omemee during Neil's earliest years before moving again to Pickering and eventually Winnipeg, where Neil grew up musically. Omemee was the inspiration for one of his most tender songs: 'Helpless', from the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album Deja Vu, which opens 'There is a town in north Ontario / With dream comfort memory to spare' and is widely understood to be about Omemee.

Omemee is a village of around 1,500 people, quiet and agricultural, the kind of Canadian small town that appears in Young's music as a kind of foundational memory -- the place before everything became complicated. He has spoken about Omemee in interviews with warmth, and the town has embraced him in return. Young survived polio as a child, contracted during his Omemee years; the illness left him with a slight limp and, he has speculated, contributed to the particular meditative quality of his music.

Omemee holds an annual Neil Young festival and has installed a mural and other acknowledgements of its connection to him. The specific childhood home is a private residence, but the town's main street and surroundings are much as Young would have known them -- genuinely rural Ontario, the landscape that 'Helpless' makes you feel even if you've never been there.