Walking back from the Metro tonight, my head was a whirl of memories and images and assurances. What a very odd film.

‘Acre Loss’ isn’t really a film per se, but ten short films set to music, without dialogue or plot. Each short could stand quite on its own and I understand they were doing just that at the art gallery earlier this year. I was pleased to see them all together, though. They belong together.

Being the child of immigrants, I think, “OK, I was born here, I grew up – or at least got older – here. I’m certifiably Albertan. But am I Albertan enough?” Seeing ‘Acre Loss’ grounded me, startled me with things I thought I had forgotten, things I had doubted about my background, and almost wrote a parallel film in my head about what it means to be a prairie girl, to have grown up here, to feel things for the flat grasslands and aspen spinneys that other Canadians don’t feel.

I’m Albertan enough. I am. And so are you. I can hear the weather report and know exactly what texture the snow will be, whether I can build a snowman out of it, whether it’s good to sled on, how it will sound when I step on it. The smell of the first days of school is a compound of Laurentian pencils and decomposing aspen leaves, with top notes of impending snow. And the branches of aspen and poplar form patterns we know as well as the veins in our wrists – looking up, if you’re lying in a field of snow, you know you’re in Alberta simply from the shape of the branches. I remembered being fifteen and having a boy kiss me leaning up against an aspen, appropriately trembling, his freezing fingers at the back of my neck. And I knew suddenly and incontrovertibly that any kid growing up in Alberta recognizes the sound of a chickadee’s call almost before he knows his own name. Or I remembered it. Or something.

If I’m not Albertan enough, why does the sight of a snowy horizon speak to me in a way that the ocean never does? Why do I want to touch an abandoned railcar sitting in the middle of a field? How can I know what it looks like if you stand directly behind a combine, and why does tangled farm equipment send all my blood surging back to my heart? Why did working at Kinsella clean all the music and shouted dialogue from my brain? Why do gold and white look so perfect to my eyes? Is it something in me responding to the colours of a fallow wheatfield in the winter, or to summer grass and salt flats? Why do I so clearly remember riding a snowmobile and reaching out my mittened hand to bat at the birches as they went by? I only did it the one time.

If I’m not Albertan enough, why is one of my most powerful memories that of catching fireflies on the CN tracks at some cottage near some lake somewhere? I had lost my glasses earlier in the day, so all I could see was purple twilight and the greenish blur of the fireflies. My arm itched where my friend’s dad had burned off a leech with a lighter brought specifically for the purpose. (He didn’t smoke.) The air was dry and dusty and the grass was slick under my bare feet, and the metal rails were still warm from the heat of the day.

I didn’t grow up in a town small enough to graffiti railcars: why do I photograph them when they pass through the plant where I now work? If I’m not Albertan enough, why did I always feel so safe at my friend’s grandparents’ place, watching the birds bicker at their feeder? Was it because we were so far from the city? Was it because his uncle so casually picked berries off the trees as we walked down to the creek? (Damn. Which uncle was that? I’m tempted to say Uncle Barry, because it wasn’t Uncle Kevin or Uncle Rene and probably wasn’t Uncle Larry.)

It was a really, really remarkable film. I can’t stress enough how perfectly these two guys captured the essence of being a central Albertan, how sad it would be to leave it, how if you distill a little bit of Lougheed and Wainwright and southeast Edmonton you get something that says I am Albertan, I know what I am. Really astonishing. I’m glad I didn’t miss it, and I’m glad to be back home.

PS. I don’t know why my captions aren’t working, but the first photo was taken at Kinsella on a field trip in 2006 and the second was taken at the plant on Thursday.

The standard argument for my parents’ picking a husband for me is that they ‘raised’ me, ergo they ‘know me better than anyone.’ My usual counter-argument is that the St. Albert Public Library actually raised me, and they know me slightly less well than Marie Antoinette. But I digress.

Anyway, on Tuesday night I went out for the standard family birthday dinner at Tropika (scrumptious as always, plus free fried bananas and ice-cream for dessert! and embarrassing singing also). And the crazy old man proved he does know one thing about me. I realized that as soon as he handed me the tiny box.

He knows that my love is a commodity and can be bought using a variety of currencies.

So, I cracked open the box expecting earrings and just oohed and aahed over the ring – a dainty narrowbanded thing, white gold with diamond chips and an oval-cut sapphire. Shining in the light of the restaurant (that is to say, my burning dessert since the candle fell over) it was the loveliest gift I’d ever received.

Coming home, I photographed it as part of my intended birthday/holiday photomontage and took a more critical look at it. White gold, yes – but only ten karat. The diamond chips are so small they derive most of their lustre from the gold rather than internal fire. And, not very surprisingly, it’s a synthetic sapphire. This is especially evident from the underside of the dimestore setting, where the blue is markedly uneven and dull. I put the ring back on again, but it was too late, having lost quite a lot of its sparkle.

My rational brain laughed gaily and said, “Ah, the old man’s a cheap bastard just like you. What a typical Paki, eh?”

My irrational brain winced as if it had been slapped and said He doesn’t love me.

My irrational brain, I hasten to mention, is told every couple of hours that it basically just dropped out of the trees and is still responding to the old cues of flee?/eat?/hump?/kill? in response to everything. I know darn well that it’s the backbrain, the part that most people have learned to talk over using the megaphone of civilization. But every once in a while it says something I have to think about more thoroughly.

My father tried to buy my love and might have succeeded had he gone to Birks instead of Boulevard Diamonds.

It’s been the same for practically everything in my life. How sad is that? I even buy my own love. If I want to feel good about myself, I scrub out the bathtub or do six loads of laundry. Then there are warm fuzzies all around and I feel justified in celebrating with wine and Swedish Berries, because that’s what lovers do! Isn’t it romantic? Good job, me! Boyfriends, don’t even get me started. Some of them thought I was distractible, because you could catch my gaze by dangling car keys in front of me. They didn’t know that I was hoping for the car – for tangible ‘evidence’ of their love, which would earn my love in return. It wasn’t a short attention span; it was greed, insecurity, the certainty that if I was really loved, I’d have ‘proof’ of it, and that the absence of that proof logically meant the absence of that love. Which is, y’know, sick.

At any rate, this cheap but pretty ring has redelivered the message through my foot-thick skull that I completely and totally need to get it together. And every time I look down at it – and its stolid, unflashy ‘good twin’ on the other hand, my honours ring – I feel surer that I have a lot of growing up to do.