<\/a><\/p>\nThere was a clear, cooling wind that felt like it was coming off foreign waters, and people gathered before their homes to share their stories. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nIn this densely populated part of the city, we catch glimpses of our neighbours rather than actually know them, but with the storm all obligations of habit and place and order seemed to vanish. We were free of that, sort of, and it was like we could no longer pretend we were strangers. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThe neighbour who never waved, the organized looking one with the yoga mat and unfriendly ponytail, well, she waved at us for the first time. Buck, the almost-old man who lives alone next door, the one I thought was an asshole until I discovered he was partially deaf and never heard me saying ‘hello,’ was like an 11 year-old. Excitedly, he rode about on his 30 year-old CCM bike, returning wide-eyed to say things like, \u201cYou should see Bernard Street! Trees everywhere!\u201d Dogs now on walks, pulled comically massive branches along behind them. Couples, happy to be without power, happy to know they were lucky enough that being without power was a fun little, adventure rather than a life-altering catastrophe, headed out for dinner. And the basement tenant, as thin and mysterious as a pirate, came up and surveyed the scene. After deducing how to solve the most immediate problem, he got a small handsaw and began to wordlessly cut the fallen branches of the tree, quickly clearing a path on the sidewalk– the ash never once dropping from his cigarette.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nAll of us now, after something so unexpected, powerful and unknowable, felt a sense of shared, mortal vulnerability. The stable, trusted world we had imagined had been revealed a flimsy thing. Lucky for so many reasons, we all lingered together outside, comforted by the other, like ancients around a campfire, small and humble beneath an endless sky.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few days ago an incredible storm came through Toronto.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[159,194,2132,4582,644,4579,35,4584,4568,1893,4580,2363,4583,4420,1329,4492,4585,1109,4581,482,55,699,3597,38,4578,3293,291,592],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6974"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6974"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6993,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6974\/revisions\/6993"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}