Thoughts of Home

A friend of mine posed an interesting question in an e-mail earlier this way: what would you miss about Canada if you no longer lived here? I've thought about the question a lot over the past couple of days.

Although I know it is not a definitive list, I know some of the things I would miss:

• plastic poppies and Remembrance Day ceremonies held in freezing rain
• Seeing Bruce Cockburn in concert
• Sunny Boy and Red River cereals
• driving from Toronto to Vancouver
• seeing soldiers of highland regiments whose relatives came from Germany, Cambodia, Jamaica, and Guatemala
• small towns with BIG artifacts (like geese or nickles or Ukrainian Easter eggs)
• Georgian Bay
• swimming in the ocean at Whitecliff park
• watching people skate at Nathan Phillips Square
• the Gulf Islands
• parks and conservation areas
• the city of Toronto
• the Okanagan Valley
• watching seals swim by the spit at Piper's Lagoon in Nanaimo
• snow, snow, and more snow
• always talking about seeing the North (but never actually going there)