Home Leave (Part 1: Canada - A few of my favorite things....

It's been fun to introduce the girlies to the many wonders of the Prarielands of Alberta, and my favorite things, things I absolutely love about coming to Canada in the summer. There are so many things I love about Canada, things that I don't really appreciate fully until I'm here again and find myself doing, a thoughtful, "Oh, yeah... I forgot about that..."

My Favorite Things:

The midnight sun. (Okay, so not quite midnight, but 2230 is pretty close!)

Even when its hot its not really hot (we've been waking to cool mornings around 10C)

The mournful wail of a train

Sighting wild animals...

the big doe that sauntered down the sidewalk across the street one of the first mornings we were here, stopping to casually nibble the neighbor's daisies ... the giant jackrabbits that peek out in various places

Sighting the non-wild animals...

cattle, horses, llamas and elk raised on the ranches and farms in the area

Seas of ripe rapeseed (we know it as canola... it's a beautiful in its flowering yellow state.)

Green fields of wheat that will, in a few weeks turn into a waving amber sea

Random farm decor (giant statue holding a round hay bale, next to his cowgirl girlfriend holding a square bale)

The World's Largests (The Worlds' Largest shopping mall- and to name just a few of the more obscure ones: The world's largest Bunnock, The worlds' largest Ukranian Egg, or the World's largest Lamp... we, I am proud to say, visited the Lamp and its adjacent museum)

But my favorite thing about Alberta is the sky. It's like being in a giant omni-max theater... everywhere you look is sky. It's so blue. I find myself just staring up at it.

And when it storms... simply majestic, because of its sheer size.

There's been a lot of rain in the time we've been visiting, and there is the lovely smell of rain hitting the dark soil. It's a perfect fresh smell, never appropriately captured by products-from soap to airfreshners-that try to duplicate the aroma.

Rainbows. Bei Bei saw her first real rainbow the other day. It was a complete rainbow, even a double rainbow in a few spots.

My Favorite Memories

When I was a kid we would spend a few weeks in the summer up here. We would don sweatshirts and bug spray and revel in the fresh air and cool summer weather. When we would head back to school in the fall, other kids would come back with stories of beach holidays that were evidenced by sun tans. But we weren't jealous, because, even though we didn't grow much darker (bundled under our hoodies) we had the distinct advantage of having nearly 18 hours of sunlight on the longest summer days.

We lived for part of those long ago weeks in the old home my great grandparents, immigrants from Wales, built shortly after they arrived in Canada. We would bundle under wool blankets at night in . We would place Canadian pennies down to the railroad tracks, and go back the next day to find their smoothed and thin remains. We would wake in the morning to the sounds of our relatives sleeping in the common upstairs rooms (in the very beds my grandfather and his eight siblings once slept in) that housed five double beds. Waking up under the heavy weight of wool blankets, with the cool, almost-wet air was my favorite memory, with my grandmother downstairs in the kitchen (with the sloping floor and the ancient calendar perpetually stuck in 1942) stoking the old kitchen stove. This remains one of my most distinct memories. (When I reminiscing with my auntie, who is one of the share holders of what remains of the tumbling estate, she assures me that the morning air always felt very damp, and that it was decidedly less pleasant to wake in this fashion if your favorite family members were not the ones snoring in the double bed across the linoleum floor from you!)

My Favorite Food

Canada has food I don't think to eat, or cannot find when I'm in other parts of the globe:

Poutine: French fries with gravy and cheese with a smidge of vinegar

Salt & Vinegar Chips (or my runner up, "All Dressed" flavour)

Perogies (Ukrainian dumplings)

Donairs (a Gyro like wrap with beef or chicken and tezziki sauce or sweet sauce)

Naniamo Bars-- a delectable layered "sqaure" or "slice", which originated in Naniamo, BC

Smarties candies... which, in my opinion are better than M & Ms (but then maybe I just think so because I don't see them as often)

Macintosh Toffee

A whole array of Nestle chocolate bars that never made their way south of the boarder: Coffee Crisp, Crunchie, the Aerobar . . .

And of course... the deliciously sweet fruit from BC, that is quite simply unparalleled anywhere (so glad we have a stop over scheduled in Vancouver!)

My Favorite People

Oh, and of course there are wonderful people here. My people. My parents. My sister. My aunties and uncles. My nearly 90 year-old grandmother. I will post more about the special people that are the reason for our soujourn. But for now, I wanted to offer a glimpse of how I see this part of Canada.