 The Countryside of Montreal

The fields are arranged in neat rows of brown mounds with green stalks waving gently in the breeze and the barns are painted red. Horses neigh and nicker in the fields, lazily swishing away flies with their long tails while grazing in the pastures. I have yet to ride a horse that isn’t a pony. In New Zealand, I rode plenty of ponies at local fairs. Looking back at it, I feel rather bad for them, having to carry countless kids on their backs all day. Long driveways lead from the farmhouses with green mailboxes at the foot. Gardening rest in buckets as people prepare their flower beds and yards for the coming winter. I identified a few—tulips, chrysanthemums, hydrangea--as my mother is an avid gardener. The red stop signs are slightly rusty and battered. In front of some garages, boats sit in trailers, soon they will be put to bed for the winter, wrapped in canvas and plastic to keep out the ice and snow. The Saint Laurent River isn’t far from here. It was from there that the French first came to Nouvelle France, AKA, Canada today. A tall hedge lines one side of the road, an impenetrable wall of shrubbery keeping out prying eyes from passers-by and clearly defining property boundaries. I peer through a crack in the hedge and make out a rusty playground in a sad state of disrepair. The kids who used to play must have long since outgrown them. I remember having a blue swing in my old house in China. Last year my dad had it torn down as part of his renovations. I used to swing on it all the time, jumping off at the apex of the swing’s arc, much to my mother’s chagrin. It made me feel like flying. As I walk by a junkyard filled with broken and rusting cars, I think about how many things from

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our pasts—swings, toys, clothes—wind up in some junkyard or landfill; it makes me sad. Yellow warning signs warning drivers of deer appear as the road bends. A city-dweller, I have never seen a deer on the road before. I remember seeing a rabbit on the bus while on a school field trip. In the brown fields, long furrows are filled with water from the previous night’s rain. A huge flock of Canadian Geese congregate in one field while pecking at seeds on the ground, fattening up before their migration south. Their plaintive honking fills me with a sense of nostalgia, as they signal the approach of winter. Rows of corn still stand in tall green stalks in a field to my right. Soon, it will be corn harvesting season. The corn at this particular time was smaller and more tender due to it not being at its ripest yet. Soon monstrous harvesting machines will be slowly, methodically cutting down the mighty stalks, collecting them before selling them at a farmer’s market. Life in the country is vastly different from that of the city. The fresh air, the space, the relative silence. It’s refreshing and disquieting at the same time. I think I’m so accustomed to the din and bustle of city life that I feel slightly unsettled in its absence.

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