She runs a 24-hour flower shop in Montreal. It is 2am and the light from her shop creates a luminous section of pavement. We passed it earlier tonight and Nik poked his head in to see if she was there. I saw bent shoulders and a broom. That’s her daughter, he said. She not here now, but we’ll bring you back to meet her. She’s a bit of a legend around here. Her shop burnt down last year and the neighbours raised money to rebuild it. That’s how much she means to us. Now the bir

I have been trying to come up with a phrase for Canada—words that convey its flavour (derivative as that might be for a country so vast). But each trip I take has a flavour to it, a certain distinctive tanginess to the cities and the people and Canada had been escaping me for a while. On the bus to Tofino, I settled on a word instead: lines. There was something safe about Canada, vast and yet simple (‘uncomplicated’ is perhaps a more precise word). Lines seemed to encompass i