To Wintry Canada!

Arriving in Vancouver to layover, I was immediately greeted to the homeland: uh, hey buddy; I'm a little short on bus fare. Help a guy out? And a second time later. At immigration, I needed to fill out the "visitor" part of the form instead of the "resident", however I eased through without a search or a second glance. I was relieved because I had a sleuth of baby panda bears hidden in my suitcase. I later got on another Air Canada flight, which was two hours late, for the ninty minute jaunt over the mountains to Edmonton.


Flying over the rockies, I remembered that some of the greatest natural beauty in the world can be found in Canada. I thought about early immigrants traversing those young and stubborn peaks in their efforts to span the nation, and now we fly over their memory in steel, with touch screen consoles. I drank an orange juice.


The prairies are also beautiful, in winter or summer, from the air or land. There is a funny irony of living and having settled a land such as this, as prairie cities are almost vulgar in their ugliness.


Finally arriving in Edmonton, I went outside and found the air to be ice cold but inviting, and I felt with great national pride, that my cold weather resistance is still somewhat intact. Edmonton is covered in snow. Mostly dirty, gravely, road snow by now, but some fields remain smooth like a marshmallow expanse, lightly blue dusted, shining clear alberta sky.


Rabbit prints in the front yard. The rabbits are big, jack rabbits, they're called, and they turn white in the winter.


The snow falls, the suburbs are crowded, the snow piles up high. When we were kids, these heaps became great forts; I think an igloo is made from cut snow and ice, and a quincy is a pile of snow, emptied out. This would become a quincy.