today i am thinking about summer. probably because i walked home from the poet‘s at six am through the slush, my boots leaking cold water into my socks and wishing for early mornings where the heat isn’t fully awake but you can feel it coming and your body anticipates it, the day ahead full of thick, syrupy sludgy air. this is definitely a symptom of winter because i hate heat- i like warmth very much, but i can really only stand one super hot day every once in awhile. if the heat is intense every day i get grumpy and irritated and no one wants to spend time with me.this morning, in the slush, i was thinking about the music festival in my hometown- we’ve gone to it every year since i was about six years old and it has grown and grown. the first year i lived in halifax was the first time i missed it after twelve years of going. i missed it last summer and will miss it this summer too, since my visit home (yes! i am going home!) is going to be in may, not july. anyway, this music festival takes place on the exhibition grounds back home, which consist of four fields and some forest next to the river. i never wear shoes there. you leave your shoes at the tent in the mornings, maybe put them on to use the porto-potty or if you have to walk on gravel. the paths through the fields are dirt and over the weekend your feet get coated in a warm grime of dust and grass-stains. and (probably because my heavy socks were waterlogged and every step i took i could feel my cold feet squishing) all i could think about was that warm layer of dust on my feet, dark around the cuticles of my toenails. it sounds odd, maybe, to miss dirty feet- and if i’m confessing, i’ll add that 1. i don’t really like feet much as a general rule and 2. the bottoms of my feet are so perpetually dirty that they have become somewhat infamous in my group of friends/housemates- but i associate the freedom of barefeet with warm late-nights, outdoor music, warm dry grass. all the things i miss in this season of soupy streets and intimate layers of thick clothing.
i wonder if i’m going to get a lot of foot fetishists visiting my blog now?
in case you were interested, this is j.cat’s solution to a lack of love for winter:
gluten-free pancakes with strawberry syrup
(yes, i got to eat it after i took the picture)
Filed under: a city called montreal, a city called vancouver, friends, photos, st. henri, thoughts about thoughts
i just wrote and deleted two entries about the olympics, because i don’t know if i can say anything new, if my anger and despair over the games can add anything to the current discourse. because i am sick of writing about the olympics, posting things about the olympics, and feeling impotent stuck here in montreal while my friends and people i don’t know are fighting and being brutalized by the police.
so i’m not going to write. but here, in pictures, is a bit of my week:
coffee (from le frigo vert) outside of the university
free, vegan lunch at the people’s potato on the 7th floor of concordia university’s hall building (located on maisonneuve and mckay)
hanging out at the sootpit with hyena and the poet
gutter ribs on my walk home, easily a favourite photo of mine.
the frozen lachine canal
in winter, the lachine canal freezes. t and i walked there yesterday through snow half-soaked by the recent thaw we’ve been having, the air thick with the deceptive january-spring that happens in montreal before it is plunged into numb, numb cold from february to april. i keep telling myself: i know what spring smells like, this does not smell like spring. spring smells thick and delicious and green. but it feels like spring: the snow piles i pass almost every day, which seem like as much a part of the streets as the concrete, are gone (though as of now, snow is falling again.) the temperature the other day was seven degrees! seven! in montreal! in winter! it is back to -18 now, as i kept telling people all week. i am the january thaw killjoy.
i have been reading a lot of blogs about st. henri and montreal recently. one of the ones i am fascinated with is called walking turcot yards and it took me a little while to realize that the turcot yards and the wasteland are one and the same. going into areas barred from the public is something i find fascinating and amazing and, in some strange way, just. i love to explore my neighbourhood, to walk down the alleys, through the streets late at night. i think cities are really only the top layer of a landscape and underneath all the buildings and concrete there are centuries of other details and stories, patches of earth, rivers even! rivers we have contained with concrete and careful planning and then abandoned like forgotten prisoners. and that makes me sad and furious, that human beings willingly choke natural water sources. it happens everywhere, but since i’ve started learning about the area where i am living, i can’t help thinking when i walk down the street: below me there is water. below me there is history.
(lately, all i want to do is make art and make plans. i have two paintings to finish, poetry to write. zines to finish. all i want to do is make delicious green food and eat it with people i care about. i want to start planning a garden, even if it is only boxes on my porch. i want to dry more herbs and learn how to make more medicinal teas and read books on ecology and permaculture and the history of montreal and colonialization. i want to make plans to visit the graves of my ancestors on manitolin island in ontario and plans to visit my home and plans to do bike-camping in the summer. i am half-overwhelmed with plans!)
truthfully, though, i feel sort of lost without a community here. this morning i was pouring coffee on top of my almond milk and the smell that resulted reminded me of my home, the small muskys coffee shops and tables selling thick coffee at the world community film festival. of the community pancake breakfasts and bean suppers, miners memorial nights, peace marches, union song circles at the lake, all the librarians knowing my name. drinking coffee with jack and muddy gum boots and the smell of the salmon run which no one except those of us who grew up with it seems to appreciate. i feel like most of the people i know here are transient and will be gone when school is over, gone when they need to leave and sometimes, that becoming part of existing communities is not only hard but unwelcome (and rightfully so, because i myself am a student and privileged and maybe transient, who knows?)
