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.