[In the southwestern Ontario town, a forty-foot, white-painted tower stands beside the newer transit station, which whisks commuters to their metropolitan destinations eight times daily. Chipped and rusted from weather and disuse, off limits, the perched holding tank has a chute jutting over the tracks, having long ago poured tonnes of processed flour into patient railcars. Here and there in the evening-kissed backyards, children wearing cherry-blossom, verdigris, aubergine or crimson-coloured jerseys practice footwork and dekes before legging it to their soccer matches on the manicured pitches of the high school grounds. Beer bugs and fresh brick dust fleck the air with deflected sunlight, also gleaming from the waxen blades of sticky ryegrass and Kentucky blue. Fences between the close-set homes block the wind so that the cedar shrubs remain sufficiently undisturbed for spiders to take up residence, too. The next development over, cranes and shovellers sleep in long-necked bird poses near the exposed foundations of unfinished houses. Gravel piles lean against the sky, tall as the basements are deep. A wide suburban street lined with sapling maples runs through the finished neighbourhood. It is empty of cars, but for the packed double driveways nuzzling each set of garage doors, which offer a satisfying geometric repetition into the vanishing point. Across Thompson Creek, culverted under the asphalt, the road ends at tumbledown barbed wire that fences off cornfields, where a heron was onc...