Windows

Few places seem as barren and still as the streets of Edmonton late on a winter night, when the cold of the starlit sky seeps down to touch the earth.  The surrounding buildings funnel the wind, swirling the vapours that rise from sewer vents and heating shafts.  From the vantage of a high apartment window, the glow of the streetlights on the snow and slick, black pavement seems unreal, alien.  A taxi passes; a lone, bundled figure slouches up the sidewalk.  They emphasize the emptiness.

I look back at the woman behind me in the bed, in the warm darkness of the room -- such a contrast to the brittle world outside.  Just enough light falls through the window to touch her cheek and show her dark hair on the pillow.  I consider returning to bed, to curl up beside her under the duvet.  But I can't sleep.  Something pulls my soul through the window and into the night.

I look at the windows of the apartments across the street, across the urban canyon.  Darkened windows, mostly, although a few glow with light.  Each window demarcates a boundary between the emptiness and a story.  Behind each window, lives unfold.  Behind each window lies a nexus of decisions, chance encounters, the blessings or misfortunes of birth; a resting place or a destination; hopes and fears; stiffled, desperate tears, and the sighs of love.

I could pass the same people in the daylight, or sit beside them on the bus, and not feel the same intimacy that I feel when I look across at those windows.  Separated by windows and the night, we are passengers in life, whose eyes meet for a moment across the tracks between two train platforms.  In that moment, we recognize the individuality of the other; we comprehend the compression of a life into a moment.  We sense the journey that brought us both to that time and place.  With a smile or a nod, we acknowledge the connection.  And then we part.

My eyes grow heavy, as the faintest melancholia settles on me.  I feel the cold reaching now through the window and touching the tip of my nose.  I tiptoe back into the warm darkness, and conform to the shape of the woman in the bed, recommiting to follow this story where it leads.

Conjunctions

After supper, with the last burnished copper of sunset silhouetting the Parliament Buildings, I crossed the Corkstown footbridge over the Rideau Canal.  A sliver of moon dangled like night's earring in the darkening sky, with a planet, Venus I think, glittering just below.  It brought back a clear memory of the same sight nearly thirty years ago, at a time of change in my life.  I recall, then, stepping out of an Edmonton door into the evening to see the conjunction of those same two bodies.  They hung alone in the dusk, just above the western horizon.  Something about their splendid isolation made me suddenly conscious of myself as their admirer.  It gave me consolation and hope to realize that the night sky still held power to arrest me.

The scent of an autumn evening triggers the same urge in me as the scent of a spring morning.  I've had Joni Mitchell singing in my head for the past few weeks.

When I woke up today and found the frost perched on the town,

It hovered in a frozen sky and gobbled summer down.

When the sun turns traitor cold

And shivering trees are standing in a naked row

I get the urge for going and I never seem to go.

And I get the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown.

Summertime is falling down, winter's closing in.

The trees aren't yet shivering and naked.  But the fallen leaves blowing down the street have me thinking about what lies beyond the next corner.  And that leads me to thinking about what I have here:  the unique conjunction in time and space of people and places that gives life meaning.