Even though I've spent much more of my life in North America than my birthplace, Russia--and have traveled fairly extensively--I don't have a particular sense of roots here (apart from being out amidst the iconic northern landscape, as per my post below).

The only place that comes close is what I call my Canadian "hometown." The latter is unsurprising: it is here that my parents and a sibling reside.

The last time I visited, it looked like this:

Grabby little ents with grabby little hands stand out so much more in the starkness of prairie winters. But I'm armed with a camera--and a whole lot of bug spray--and hope to document a bit of prairie summers, too. After all, this is a place where the occasional monotony of a completely flat landscape is accompanied by an enormous, suffocating, too-unreal-to-be-true blue of the sky with not a cloud around.

And if I didn't fear embarrassing myself with considerably sleep-deprived typos, I'd tell you all about the brighter-than-bright Moon that lit the road all the way to the airport just after 4 o'clock this morning.