Wednesday, July 01, 2009

It's Home And We Love It

From today's NY Times, the best appreciation of the country I love (and speaking as someone who grew up just a few miles away from Exeter, this guy is not joking about the snow):
I miss the snow. Yes, I know the United States gets snow, but to my Canadian eye, American snow is like American health care: sporadic, unreliable and distributed unevenly among the population. In my hometown, Exeter, in the heart of Ontario’s snow belt, punishing squalls were a fact of life from November through mid-April. One time, 39 inches fell on the town in three days — and school wasn’t even canceled. And it wasn’t just the quantity of snow — it’s the speed with which it arrived.

When I was a child, it wasn’t unusual for my 15-minute walk home from school to begin under clear skies and end in a blizzard. I remember once, when I was 8 years old, stumbling into my house, my hair covered in powder and my eyelashes frozen together, and screaming, “Why do we live here?!” My mother took my face in her warm hands and said, “Because it’s where people love you.”

At the time, that struck me as the lamest statement ever uttered by a human being. But today, as I sit under the California sun, it only strikes me as halfway lame, and maybe even less than that.

— TIM LONG, a writer for “The Simpsons”
Happy Canada Day!
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 01, 2009

    It doesn't snow much in Vancouver, and still less in Victoria, the two places in Canada I've lived in the most. You might consider that when elevating snow to a defining characteristic of Canadianness.

    God, I get tired of Easterners navel-gazing sometimes.

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  2. I get tired of people who live in paradise complaining about easterners. Define Canada any way you want to -- on your page.

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