Dispatch from Manitoba

When we first got here, to Northern Manitoba, on the edge of Clearwater Lake, I did not know if there was one fox or two or maybe more. A fox was a fox, so to speak. Two months later and I can't believe I ever thought that. One fox. And she is a girl. And I would know her anywhere.

Same with the birds. One of the teddy-birds, as I call the gray jays for their uncanny resemblance to a stuffed animal, is a little dumber than the rest. It gets anxious of noises and is always the first to abandon food if another bird comes too close. 

When you first come out here, the landscape is not black and white. Gradually, it is. The most color you will see is the sky: when the sun rises, it is more color than you can handle; when it sets, it looks like a bad hotel painting of the beach at sunset—an exaggeration of color.

In the cities, I do not think I would have noticed the color of the birds. My reasonable brain knows they are not as shockingly red and yellow as they appear to me here. In black and white, magpies show off their metallic blue. The grosbeaks, though, they are the ones I can just barely look away from.

What is your favorite color, you might ask me now.
Evening Grosbeak, would be my reply.

xo
jenniey




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