Feathered fruit of the voyage

We went to Airdrie last weekend to spend Halloween with family. It was a lovely trip, and very relaxing. We put in a few hours of wandering in malls, searching for hard-to-find garments, rewatched Iron Man II, and talked, talked, talked some more. I spent a lot of time reading All Clear, by Connie Willis, on my iTouch. My in-laws are good cooks, trick or treating with the Niecelet was great fun and even the weather was terrific.

The part of the city I was visiting is easy to dismiss as a featureless suburban wasteland, full of cookie-cutter houses, but it’s under construction, which means it still has vast fields of prairie here and there, waiting to be dug up, and the development itself has some relatively big green spaces. So I made it out once with the camera, hoping to catch a jackrabbit and a magpie.

Magpie

The rabbit did not pan out, as it happens, but in addition to this moody blur of a ubiquitous Alberta bird, I did see an astounding number of grasshoppers sunning themselves on a black tarp on the way to the grocery. I imagine the black fabric was just a tad warmer than the grass itself.

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About Alyx Dellamonica

Alyx Dellamonica lives in Toronto, Ontario, with their wife, author Kelly Robson. They write fiction, poetry, and sometimes plays, both as A.M. Dellamonica and L.X. Beckett. A long-time creative writing teacher and coach, they now work at the UofT writing science articles and other content for the Department of Chemistry. They identify as queer, nonbinary, autistic, Nerdfighter, and BTS Army.

2 Responses to Feathered fruit of the voyage

  1. Elaine says:

    I’m glad you had a nice time in the suburbs and that you found some feathers there. Hey that line could be the first line in a Simon and Garfunkel song, a slightly warped S and G song. S and G with a little Weakerthans thrown in.