Place

Now that I travel a bit more I am appreciating and respecting more the validity of how place affects and influences.  I have lived here in Vancouver, B. C., Canada for nearly my entire life.  I was born here and I grew up here in breathtakingly flat Richmond.  Except for one single winter that I spent in Toronto when I was nineteen I have always experienced more or less mild winters punctuated by perhaps one or two cold spells and less than a week of snow every year.  The memory of rain, constant nonstop rain resides deep in my mind.  The profile of Grouse Mountain, the Lions, Mount Hollyburn, Seymour and Hemlock are so etched in my mind that whenever I hear the word mountain that is the profile I always see.  The appearance of snowdrops in January, crocuses and daffodils in February, hyacinths and tulips in March brighten and delight the chilly damp days of our long spring.  I have no idea what it is like to live with uninterrupted snow until April, as is the annual fate of the rest of the country.  The rolling glittering waves of the ocean when the sun shines and the dark brooding outline of the fir, cedar and hemlock trees, all these and much more have sunk deep into my primal memory.
     With the grey rainy days, the dark afternoons from November to January, the dark brooding presence of the dense towering evergreen forest there is a sense of this place compatible with what Emily Carr captured in many of her paintings of the West Coast Rainforest.  I have noticed with many native Vancouverites as well as myself a certain deep pragmatism offset by a dreamy, brooding spirituality.  A luxuriousness tinged with sadness.  The raven's call, the croaking call of the great blue heron and the honking Canada geese with the crying of seagulls are the music that punctuate the cool, damp oxygen-drenched air of the Wet Coast.  There is also a certain absence of colour, or of brilliant colour.  The hues are dark, grey, green and blue with a little white and a little black.  This also tells us who we are.
     This is so different from Mexico where I am going.  I enjoy visiting Mexico but doubt that I could ever, even if I could, live there.  My sense of place is not Mexican, and even though I hugely appreciate and greatly admire the sense of the Mexican this is not the environment that has informed my DNA or determined the sort of person I have developed into.  Every year I go there for around a month.  The sun, the colour, the vibrancy and passion, so lacking in the ambience that is Vancouver, I soak up like a solar battery running on empty and I carry this beautiful warm and laughing energy with me while I readjust to living again in a city void of colour set in a landscape so dramatic, brooding and luxuriant and cool and damp.