I am a single woman in my early 30′s living in the greatest city in Canada. A real multicultural urban civilized fantastic place that’s bustling with millions of people and countless more opportunities. I don’t have a driver’s license because public transit is more eco-conscious. I dress with style, I raise a daughter with pink hair,  I have a very frou-frou professional government job. I go to yoga classes and wine bars and comedy clubs, to television premieres and clothing line launches, to rallies and protests armed with a megaphone and a flag. It’s not because I’m cool or rich, oh no! Only because I’m living in such a great city, with so many opportunities. I enjoy my life so much!

This is who I am now, but it’s not who I was then.

Far to the north in the Great White Wasteland, I was raised with wolves and skidoos and ice fishing and bears. We ate moosemeat and had three channels, two of which were French. Growing up, our babysitter was a great big black Newfoundland dog named Charlie, who barked for my dad if we got too close to the road or the electric cow fence.

Every year my grandpa, who drove snowplow for the township for a living, made a twenty-foot snow mountain in our yard so we could toboggan off the roof into the pasture on the east side of the barn. One year in March when it began to melt, my grandma and my younger brother carved and whittled it into a fifteen-foot penguin ice sculpture, complete with black and yellow spray paint.

We picked blueberries in the summer, and pine cones too, because you could sell them to the Ministry of Natural Resources by the bucketful. They sold the pine cones to companies that either harvested the nuts for food consumption, or shipped them to Japan for something.

Sometimes in the winter it would be a snow day not because it was snowing, but because it was too cold to risk going outside or even starting the school buses. I went to an all-French Catholic school. It’s not as great as it sounds.

I was a baton twirler. Not for parades, but choreographed baton twirling dance/gymnastics routines. I was an assistant coach for a little while too.

I have mucked out barns, collected eggs in chicken coops, watched any number of animals being born and being killed, climbed trees, shot birds, reeled in a big one, gunned the exhaust and slept under the stars.

The people you love most are genuine. You know  them as they really are.

But… you might not know them as they once were.