Today, Toronto is mild, soft and quiet.
Heavy snowflakes drift from the sky as directionless as soap bubbles. A thick coat of white blankets the ground and for a minute, more than a minute, really, you feel that all missteps and obligations have been erased. The snow deadening the sounds of the city, you feel time and space and that slowly now, the world is about to start again.
It’s all just so clean and perfect.
I took Heidi, our Miniature Dachshund, out to play fetch in Jimmy Simpson Park. There is nothing she loves more in this world. She is so alive and perfect in her body. Her tail beating like a propellor, she jumps through the snow like a mountain goat, glowing in her little dog body. Overcome with her own radiance, she runs laps around the fenced in tennis courts, yipping, barking her happy psalm of life.
This makes me think of a line of poetry by Christian Wiman:
“ A ridiculous red-jacketed poodle leaps twisting biting snowflakes like miracle toys.”
And just outside of the fence where Heidi and I play, an old dog sits watching. This is Casey, a Golden Labrador. Now deaf and plagued with arthritis, he often comes to the park when his master plays on the outdoor hockey rink. A sweet dog, he just sits there waiting, his tail wagging ever so slightly as he watches Heidi bounding through the snow, as if his body remembers such days, too.
A friend of ours has moved to Buenos Aries for the winter to take language training. Alone and feeling slightly discouraged– having discovered that the apartment she rented was located on the train tracks and that her husband wouldn’t be able to join her for another month– she was happy to speak with us, to feel connected to home. We told her about the snow that was falling and how the city was supposed to have been shut down last week due to a storm, and the warmth of memory filled her voice.
From 6,000 miles away, “Oh, I love snow days. They’re so beautiful, and then when the power goes out, it’s so exciting, and you can’t do anything but curl up under the blankets and watch your favourite, old movies on the laptop until the screen goes black.”