Proverbial chip

Driving out of Lindsay today, Marian is intensely visual. She points out a lilac blooming beside a house; along the ridge of a hill, the bushes of a fencerow shine silver against purple rainclouds.

"That's beautiful," she says. "I could never leave Ontario. If I ever went somewhere else, it would only be a year or two. I would have to come back."

"Is it the landscape?" I ask.

"Yes," she says, exclaiming over trilliums drifted white in the woods slipping past. "Have you ever stood in the middle of a 90-acre cow field? I love how the hills make me feel small."

I didn't set out to teach my children to love the land. She got it by osmosis.

"Did you know Ontario has two per cent of the world's forests?" she says.

Brenna sits in the back seat, taking in all our conversation, occasionally commenting.

Later she points out, "You two are carrying on two conversations at once."

Marian and I are both talking about Cat Stevens and blackheads at the same time.

In Guelph we stop at Blockbuster to rent videos. I buy a used copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey for $12.99. Lucky find. It just came into today, the clerk tells me.

At home, I present the sleeveless summer shirts I bought at the Tibetan store on Yonge Street. The girls love them, and I get a big hug from Brenna. Hers is watercolour wildflower stripes. Marian's is black with some coloured braid around the collar.

"It suits me perfectly," she says.

It goes with the black ankle-length skirt she bought herself on sale at a mall. With her nape-length bleached hair, robin's-egg blue eye shadow and intense eyeliner, she looks like a younger incarnation of Madonna.

Now they're watching Pom Poko.