EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Rumours of Spring Authenticated

Every year about this time Ann and I take a drive beyond the ever-spreading outskirts of the city. Our destination is always the same, J&C Gardens, a pacific greenhouse operation situated off Airport Road in the rapidly disappearing farmland southeast of Edmonton and the newly incorporated city of Beaumont.

Mill Woods, now a long established capital suburb, almost encroaches on the corporate limits of Beaumont, once a remote French-Canadian farming community. The demarcation is the Anthony Henday ring road. Beaumont’s population has more than doubled since 2006. It is now home to nearly 20,000 commuters. Its main street is faux quaint, anchored by a French restaurant that gourmands swear is worth the drive.

Beaumont’s most impressive and dominant structure is the lovely red brick Saint Vital Catholic church with its steeple and pristine white trim. It sits at the crest of a steep hill which descends to the older, other side of town and leads ultimately to J&C Gardens provided you take a left at Airport Road. The straight ahead vista through the windshield before the drop suggests 100-yard elongated shadows at noon even though nothing in the unfolding landscape is taller than a fencepost or a yellow traffic sign. The not so distant right showcases all the signs of progress: the oil patch-centric Nisku industrial area and its empty travel hotels, the grey ribbon of Alberta’s major highway, the new outlet mall with its prison guard towers, the even newer racetrack and casino and of course the corkscrew control tower of the Edmonton International Airport.

Saint Vital (Vitalis in Latin and men’s grooming) is not so obvious. St. Vital is a Winnipeg, Manitoba, city ward, originally a vibrant and now historic enclave of French-Canadian and Metis settlers adjacent to Fort Garry. It’s easy to infer how the name leapt further west over Prince Rupert’s Land to Beaumont. However, my searching of both the Catholic Encyclopedia and Wikipedia has dredged up eight Saint Vitals, five of whom were Italians and three of whom were martyred. Faith is a complex construct; said Saints Vitals are not be confused with Saint Vitus, he’s a wholly different dance.

The layout of J&C Gardens resembles a human hand, palm up. The main structure is the base which includes a splayed, possibly green, hitch-hiker thumb. The too many fingers, pale tents shaped like Nissen huts, extend from the perpendicular. We turn up every spring always hopeful that the dirt and gravel parking lot won’t be a shoe-sucking quagmire. Ann brings a list of her summer planting plans which also includes notations of past failures, flora to avoid. This is big, important and ultimately fleeting stuff, a lot like life.

I man the three-tiered blue steel cart. Ann examines the plants as if they were Lawren Harris paintings in the National Gallery; a book in a bookshop too, you know, you never purchase the one atop the stack, you have to dig. I’m the runner even if the process involves a pleasant and leisurely couple of hours. I move the potato vines and sunpatiens from tent to cart and everything must be just so because there’s more to come and the gartenmeister fuschia and the alyssum will need their spaces. Ann’s walking up and down the floral rows three inches off the sagging concrete. Man, she’s shimmying on an ether of scent and colour, even the neon geraniums are impressed. All you Saint Vitals, here’s a genuine sense of wonder, sense of joy.

And, believe it, there’s another attraction at J&C for me that just enhances a happy errand. There is a cat who hangs about the main greenhouse. Its fur is charcoal accented with some faint caramel markings resembling incomplete tiger stripes. I deserted Ann and our cart to go searching for my indifferent harbinger; we’ve been tight for years. I found the little soul curled up sound asleep in a picked-over black plastic tray of sweet peas.

Spring.

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