Happy Canada Day!

This ad, while for a product I don't actually buy as I don't like coffee (though I do love me some Timbits), makes me tear up.

It makes me tear up because I am an immigrant. Granted, I came from a place that is a developed Western European country, and where I'd still have had a pretty good life. Granted, I was too young to remember having lived elsewhere. Granted, my parents never underwent a long period of seperation. For me, though, the story of Canada is, in very large part, an immigrant story. I'm not from here originally. Neither are a lot of people. My parents, and so many others, came here looking for something better, and were made welcome, and were home the minute they stepped off the plane in this giant place where most people didn't speak their language very well, if at all, but tried to anyway to make them feel comfortable.

There are a lot of schools of thought regarding immigration. For my part, I think it's a wonderful thing - here is my country, and it's the place people think of when they think of a better place. It's my home. I love it quietly and deeply (except during international hockey competitions and conversations about beer, when I proclaim my love and pride to the world). I love the size of the sky. I love the sounds of its cities - cars and buskers, snatches of conversation in a hundred different languages. I love the waves against the rocks, and I love the leaves under my feet in the forests. I love hockey.

I love that, even though I wasn't born here, this is my place, and has been for nearly twenty-six years - it was my place the moment I arrived.

Happy birthday.

Today, I went here.

(Mont-Saint-Bruno and Lac du Moulin, Québec).

( Here are rocks, trees, a lake, a dragonfly, two snapping turtles, waterlilies, the old mill bridge, and some family of mine who consented to having this picture posted. )