Lost and found is my eureka! blog, my rediscovery of my short fiction and poetry submissions published in literary magazines and university literary journals some decades ago. Interspersed, occasionally, with more recent, hitherto unpublished pieces.
Born and bred to this winter Arctic wilderness that is Canada, we pride ourselves in toughing out the windy blasts that chill one's marrow, the sleeting rain, dense ice fog and miles upon mountain piles of unrelenting snow hushing everyday winter lives in our country, the Great White Northern region. As the Inuit did, we wear mukluks and great, down-filled parkas, finger-awkward mittens and the coureur de boise toque.
We know the symptoms of frost-bite and the dangerous plunge of internal body temperatures. Our literature is rich with tales of those who, setting forth bravely in the midst of a raging snowstorm mere metres from the security of home never return alive. The danger of lake and river ice too premature to hold has seen too many slip into frigid waters, trapped by an transparently unforgiving ceiling, intransigent to self-rescue.
Ice fog moves silently and swiftly to drown a landscape in opaque silver-grey beyond which lies danger, and within its unknown depths the innocently unheeding the carefree unaware become trapped in jungles of twisted, warped and burning metal haplessly driven into unseen. Storms now and again so persistently unrelenting that frozen volumes topple great trees, haul down fire-crackling hydro lines and coat all surfaces with an amazing layer of smooth, deadly ice.
At the best of times we revel in the pristine white loveliness of our Northern woods, traipse wide-legged on snowshoes, zip freely along on skies and sleds, exuberant calls muffled by the deep landscape coverlet of the acquired snowpack, the winter sun glinting gold-and-silver through a veil of slowly descending, starry clumps of frozen white beauty on Canada's arras.
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