Posts tagged canada

Allow me to romanticize.

Bring me to the small Alberta towns (Stavely, maybe?) and sit with me in the quiet dark and eat the small-town Chinese food.

Chinese Cafés are immortal and gone away.

I am a Manitoban body, with ruddy skin red around the nose, hands that remember the earth, a tongue that recalls a Slavic language like an embrace imagined from old love stories.

But I have an Albertan soul.

So let’s go through the fields, out of Edmonton, beyond Red Deer, because I have spent too long longing for some ties to my distant Ukrainian roots, too long imagining another narrative.

There is an Albertan culture and I want to discover it for myself. I want to enter the prairie and sit, eat the Chinese, Japanese, Ukrainian food so that I might be.

I don’t mean to misappropriate. Tell me your history. My spirit was an immigrant too.

During the night I must have woken up to shut my window, must have felt the cold, must have noticed the lightning punch through my shut eyelids. You missed another rainy morning.

Does the rain make the concrete pull into itself, draw away from the wetness and become even harder? I felt it in my joints with every step. And oh, the train whistle blew so close to me and you still haven’t heard that, have you? I thought of recording the sound and sending it to you in a little file, but I don’t know how that works; how can something so large and defining as that huge noise be whittled down into ones and zeros, cross the distance to you long and emerge from some dark wiry tunnel a little softer, crackled and powerless?

This is how it feels to be landlocked, in love. There are heavy iron rails following the trail you took away from here, loud angry shouts in my chest, lonely one-noted train whistles of this prairie that you can’t hear where you are.

But could I lean on the doorframe, halfway between a whitewashed cottage and the shore of Prince Edward Island; that I could be against the meadow and forest of Ontario, the grasslands and wheat fields of Saskatchewan. I do love Canada - the Canada of my mind; romanticized and green. I’m glad for the old grain elevators, for the old schoolhouse on the hill, the railway and the train whistle at night.

And I do love the Canada I exist in and that exists in itself, I love it for all of its possibilities. I am a boy of Manitoba, Ontario, Alberta whose hair will always be the blowing wind against the grain, whose voice will always be the sound of birds and crickets. I am a Canadian boy.

Alberta may lend me love just for summer where the air is sweet with lilacs and gasoline. She may, with the promise of hot heavy storms.