Reflections in a scalloped mirror

Have you been missing the photographs here lately? I have. And there is an explanation: somehow, between Vermont and Montreal about three weeks ago, I "lost" my camera battery charger. This is impossible, but it has happened. I've looked under the couch cushions, behind the piano, in every bag, in the bed where I tend to rest my suitcase as I'm packing. Nothing. So I guess I will have to give up and order a new one, although it pains me. That has effectively stopped my picture-taking, but the silver lining is that in the past few days I've been looking back through my archives of un-posted photographs, and finding many I like that for one reason or another didn't make the cut at the time. So maybe I can tide things over that way for a while, until the replacement arrives.

Montreal is white today, wth a pale blue sky. Downtown, the stores are bedecked for Christmas, and today at church we chanted the Advent litany and lit the first candle on the Advent wreath. It seems early. The sun was bright and warm on the wet pavement as we walked down St. Catherine Street, and then when we turned the corner at La Baie (the department store of the venerable Hudson Bay Company, soon to be sold to an American conglomerate, I heard) the wind - as if commenting on that development - sent an arctic blast tunneling down along the red sandstone block.

Yesterday I went out for a walk as the sun was setting. The sidewalks were covered with several inches of sandy, slippery snow - the kind that makes the balls and heels of your feet slip sideways in a mushy motion, and after a block or two you begin to feel it in your thighs. I have dreams where I am walking in deep sand, or snow, like this, and all the strength eventually drains out of my legs until I am struggling to inch forward - and grateful to wake up. In reality it's not nearly that bad, and if I buy a new pair of vibram-soled boots this winter, walking will be even easier. Last night there was no wind at all, and I headed up the block looking at the first of the holiday lights on the balconies and porches. Ahead of me, three little boys chased each other, yelling, up the street and down the alley, as little boys do in every city - whether sandy and dry, or cold and snowy, or humid and tropical. An old woman, wrapped in a green coat with a fur-lined hood, stepped aside to let them race past. A mother pushed a stroller through the deep snow of an alley. Wanting to go out somewhere on a Saturday night, a young man brushed off his car windshield for the first time this year. A lone bicyclist rode down the center of the street; the bikepaths are closed. Parka-clad people hunch against the cold, shake their mittened hands, stamp their feet when entering a building. In the parks, the white-sided hockey rinks are set up, ready to be flooded. Children, bundled and soft like stuffed bears, play on the slides and swings, or lie on sleds pulled by their parents. One begins to walk...carefully.

That's how winter begins.

Comments

[marjorie]

Brillllliant.