"Poor" and "sad" in comparison

Perth, Ontario (photo by me)

The other day when I posted an album of photos on Facebook I got an interesting comment from Nadiia, a Ukrainian friend who used to live here but now lives in Romania. She said of the Ontario scenery in my pictures: "I did not like it though, kind of poor and it is sad."

I think she meant that Ontario looks pretty desolate at the end of winter. The landscape is certainly stark before the buds open and the spring growth starts. The grass that re-emerges from the receding snow has a brown, exhausted look, and the bush is grey and haggard like someone's face after a long and serious illness, without much sign of recovery yet. (It will come; only you have to be patient.)

Sibiu, Romania (tourism website)

Or perhaps Nadiia was referring to the little towns between Ottawa and Kingston along the route we were flying when I took the photos. They look "kind of poor and sad" to me as well, before the bustle of activity during their all-too-short tourist season (June, July, August, plus a week or two before / after).

Compared with the lively and picturesque eastern European towns she knows, with their warm spring weather and centuries of cultural heritage, these places in Ontario can't compete. Kingston itself looks very run down at this time of year: shops and museums closed, a burst water main on King Street, a deserted marina still sheathed in ice, only one stall in the market (selling a few potted flowers). But I saw drifts of flowering crocuses and snowdrops in the lakeside gardens, which is more than can be said for Ottawa.

I do see a sort of attractiveness in the simplicity of these landscapes; the air is very clear too, in fine weather. From the air you can see how the little towns, still in the early stages of development, relatively speaking, have come into being around the rivers. Maybe in another two or three centuries they'll have become almost as appealing and historic as their European equivalents. Maybe the climate will have changed by then, as well.