The beginning and the end of some of the days have blazed with pinks, peaches, violets and colours that may never have a name, because you would do just a well to take the time to soak them in as take the time to try to name them. The latter is futile and the former is so much more nourishing. When I arrive home at the end of the day, from my work in an enclosed space surrounded by people, I race to the second floor deck, ripping off my clothes between the front door and the deck door and, like some kind of repressed claustrophobe, burst onto the deck to take in the air, the silence, the expanse of sky, whether it is a daring clear blue, I say daring because there is so much space up there, that I wonder where the one bit of cloud might be hiding. Other days it burns in the west and I swear I can see as far as California as I think of my friend living there, between busy streets, as the sun, my sun, presses its face into the hills and through the LA day, smoggy or blue too. Or I watch the thunderheads collect along the north shore of Lake Ontario, to the northeast, and bypass us on our island–other times I look south and think of Jane Urquhart’s Map of Glass and her description of the lightening flashing on the south shore of the lake, perhaps somewhere over Rochester. I’ve seen it and I wonder where she was when she saw it.
But my mornings are different, today it was an unusual warmth and scent that reminded me of Europe in the fall, something manmade, burnt and fragrant. That is the only way I can describe it. I sat with my tea, on the ground and then the subtle scents of mint came over my shoulder. Under the warmth that the dawn promised, the garden was filling the air with one last soaking of scent, a reminder that, though many plants were now dying, they weren’t to be ignored. I faced the east and the rising sun, the day-old full moon setting at my back. I thought of the land out there, cities, Montreal. As a child I loved our trips to Montreal so much that I would often look at the Ottawa sky and think how much nicer it would be to experience that same sky in Montreal. Moments like this it is so easy to believe that everything and everyone is out there, beneath the sky.
Andrew Binks 