Maple Leaf By: Tomson Highway

I'm from subarctic Manitoba where there are no maple trees of any kind. In southern Manitoba, yes, they do have maples, Manitoba maples, that is, not sugar maples, the kind whose leaves turn bright red in the fall. In the far north, where I come from, among trees deciduous we have only birch, poplar, and willow, trees whose leaves turn yellow and orange and brown in autumn, just not red.

Later in my life, I ended up at the University of Western Ontario in London to study music and (for me) that most foreign of languages: English. I arrived in eastern Canada in late summer and that fall, on one of those note-perfect, crisp, sun-splashed mornings, I found myself walking to the university campus across this park, a route I normally did not take.

So here I am walking. And walking and walking and thinking and thinking, blind to passing people, blind to passing traffic, the only thing I see the thoughts jostling for attention inside my mind. All of a sudden, I find myself standing in front of this gigantic, this magnificent, this incredibly tall sugar maple. For one born near the treeline, that's what it was: tall. Its leaves were so bright in their redness it almost hurt the eyes to look at it. And because not a cloud marred a clear blue sky, sunlight fell on it undiluted, uninterrupted. And there was a breeze that seeped through the complex filigree of foliage in such a way that the leaves trembled, shuddered, shimmered. And whispered.

I was transfixed. I had never in my life seen such a vision. And it was at that precise moment—at age 22, some 30 years ago—that I became, for life, an Ontarian. I've been here ever since and will probably die here, at this cottage in northern Ontario surrounded by the shimmer and the whisper of fire-engine-red sugar maple leaves

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