Sometimes you develop a clearer idea of a place when you move away from it. As Descartes said 'it is good to know something of the customs of different people in order to judge more soundly of our own.' It's hard to pin down what makes a country its own, it comes to me more in fragments and in subtlety.
During an exchange semester in Hong Kong, the American students spent enough time with the Canadian students that they adopted the habit of tacking on an 'eh' at the end of their phrases.
There's a certain clarity that is particular to my remembrances of Canada - it's in the sky, in the water, in the air, and it is a sharp contrast to the heavy smog of Beijing, the noises and smells of Hong Kong, the humidity of a Washington summer.
In Tobermory, the waters are cold and pristine. And at night, after the earth rotates away from the sun, the stars appear against a dark sky that is untouched by man-made light. It is almost claustrophobic to look up and feel as though you are enveloped within and falling into handfuls and handfuls of gold specks.
The cool autumn air breaking the heat of summer signified both an ending and a beginning. The sidewalks are covered in layers of crisp fallen russet maple leaves, this mix of leaves not to be found elsewhere. The decay of leaves accompanied the start of a new year - the return to school, with classes and reunions with friends.
These past two springs I found out that it is the Little Leaf Linden tree that perfumes Charles Street and Queen's Park, and the Japanese lilac outside my bedroom window that perfumes the front of the house.
A bitter winter irks many of us. The endless snow and grey slush and the nostril-freezing air and the wind chills that drop the temperature an additional ten degrees make many of us yearn for the warm days of May.
But without the winter, the four distinct seasons of Canada are incomplete. There's a sense of fullness to be found in cold winters and hot summers. And it's this keen sensitivity to the gradual changes that makes one acutely aware of the brevity and continuity of seasons passing one into the next, year after year, that evoke a sense of parallelism that time, like life, is passing on.
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In Toronto there are moments - watching and inhaling as the marijuana parade marches down Bloor, eating lunch with friends at a patio on the corner of Church and Maitland, walking to Sunday morning yoga in bare shoulders and bare legs - moments which I look back on and think of with gratitude.
I found a 2004 National Geographic map of the world and taped it up on the wall. In satellite images, we are composed almost entirely of a thin band of light hugging the United States' northern border, stretching from the North Pacific to the North Atlantic. It is an expansive land of beauty and freedom, and looking at the map of all the countries in the world, a moment pauses, in which I think that many countries do not have this beauty and freedom.
The gratitude I realize now comes from holding the knowledge that I can be here and the knowledge of how much fragile freedom is gifted to me - to go somewhere, say something, dress in a way, to be of a religion, a race, a sexual orientation. The freedom to be.
The dark blue passport is a token of home, and wherever else I am in the world, it is always with a small bit of quiet love that I am able to say I'm Canadian. It's a pure, simple, uncomplicated type of love. We don't have a complicated history; it's a country that aims in its struggles to do the right thing. It's a country that provides the foundation of security for its people to take risks, to be free, to go and to come back.