It's a northern capital city, the second-coldest, snowiest in the world. In the summer, because it's located in a large valley, in a geographic area once covered by the ancient Champlain Sea, where vast retreating sheets of ice carved out geological anomalies, it becomes stiflingly hot and humid. So people who live in the Ottawa Valley, much less the greater Ottawa area, are beset by mind-numbing chills in the winter, having to shovel out from under great piles of snow, and heat-debilitating temperatures in the summer.

But it is a beautiful area. We have lakes and rivers in great abundance, and old hardwood and pine forests replete with the animals that live there, fish that stream in the waters and a revolving bird population; those who visit from the boreal forests and southern climes during their migratory seasons, and those who remain year around.

It's a fairly quick drive from where we live to downtown Ottawa, taking the picturesque Eastern Parkway, driving along Sussex Drive to the heart of the capital, and on toward the Western Parkway, to our destination. Ottawa is a city with two great rivers bisecting it, the Rideau and the Ottawa rivers. And it is a city whose great area is replete with green space, parks wherever one looks, large and small, repeating the landscape.

Ottawa has its historical and its government buildings. Its great houses, many of which are owned by foreign countries whose embassies are also located here. It's a picturesque, beautiful city with ample cultural institutions, a thriving and vibrant arts community. It is a good place to raise children, a good place for families.

When we set out for the drive, it was a heavily overcast day, a dark, brooding, very beautiful sky. Reminding us, in fact, of a 19th Century European painting we have on our walls, reflecting a farm in the Netherlands, its landscape semi-drowned by flooding, the sky dark, ominous, the farmhouse hunkered quietly into the landscape.