all my marbles

Winter in media is a calm, quiet thing. Snowfall softens. Cold air chills and stills. Scarves, mittens, fireplaces, cinnamon. Visions of somewhere warm and woolen and safe.

I spend winter locked up like a dead fish in an icebox. When I was a kid, I came home from school to play pond hockey in the front yard or sled down the ice slick hill my house sat on. My first job was teaching ski lessons at the local resort. My mom had a special recipe for hot chocolate (the secret is melted marshmallows). Some of my favourite memories of her are from long snowshoe-footed walks through the forest behind our house. My Louisiana-born mother had endless wonder for the strange icicle formations that dangled from trees and the tiny animal tracks stamped into the snow. She made winter magical through interest alone. 

In Toronto, the winter wind has teeth. Everything about the city that is already cold and grey gets colder and greyer. By the end of it, most years, I struggle to remember why I moved here in the first place. I don’t find majesty in the winter anymore. My mother, like the birds, is far south. As I watch the sun set through an office building window, I wonder why I don’t fly away, too. When the crocus starts to bloom, I start Googling. 

Most beautiful hikes in Ontario 

Nature reserves driving distance from Toronto 

Old growth forest in Ontario 

I send frantic, cryptic texts to my boyfriend asking if he will drive us as far up north as we can get within the span of a day. I want to take him to a place as untouched by civilization as possible. I want us to find ourselves so deep within the wilderness that, if lost, we would likely not be found. He has spent three winters with me now – these requests do not disturb him. He calls me a “true luddite” with fondness. I tell him he’s wrong, of course. I love the Internet! I’m a big fan of indoor plumbing! Thank God I live in an age where my mother and brother are only a Facetime away! 

The issue is that all the stimuli of the city – the sounds, the smells, the wind – weigh heavy on my shoulders and tug against my weak frame. The cold exhausts me. It irritates me. I am trapped in my own parka; strangled by my own scarf. On a good, sunny day, I find inspiration in the excitement – an escape from the darkness of the cold months in late night restaurants and public transit that brings me safely and efficiently to my friends’ front doors. Eventually, though, the frustration grows too intense. I notice it first as a raw itching in my chest. It feels like I have gone too long without hearing birds sing. My high rise apartment starts to feel prison-like. Soon I am wondering why I haven’t written a poem in a month – why everything I try to write winds up being about a river, but I can’t visualize that river, only imagine its voice singing loudly in my ears, drowning everything else out. When this madness overtakes me, I am certain modernity is the cruelest thing mankind has ever brought upon itself. Early April is the season for reading Eliot and feeling his phrases worm their way inside your coat through buttonholes and loose seams. 

Finally, now, it is May. 

This past Friday, the weather was beautiful. It was one of those perfect early May days that inspire me to text my boyfriend and ask if he’ll meet me for a walk after work. Instead, he picked me up in a Communauto. We stopped by a church in his childhood neighbourhood that sells Filipino food out of a tent on the corner. The man in the tent poured “magic sauce” from a repurposed Crown Royal bottle filled with peppers and an unidentified liquid into a small plastic baggie. He told us to drizzle the sauce on our noodles and “let the magic happen.” We walked down to the beach with the sauce and noodles and sat to eat. We watched gentle waves lap against the shore of Lake Ontario and dogs drag their owners up and down the sand in pursuit of seagulls. I told him about my daily crashout – how much I hate my job and my apartment and those Tiktoks I keep seeing of people who live in China and can pass an entire day without ever touching the ground because the infrastructure of their city has begun to capitalize on vertical space. Imagine, your whole life spent up in the sky! 

Eventually, the hypnotic waves settled my restless spirit. The noodles were good – although not as good as my boyfriend’s grandma’s. While I enjoyed the spiced vinegar flavour of the magic sauce, we agreed it somewhat compromised the delicate flavour of the pancit. Sometimes, real magic relies on simplicity.

I grew up on the East Coast and have always felt underwhelmed by Toronto’s beaches, but the cries of the gulls and the glint of sunlight on the water reminded me a little of home. We gathered our bags and I followed my boyfriend through the hopscotch series of parks along the water’s edge. We stopped into Ed’s for ice cream. He pointed out the mise en scène from important moments in his childhood. I felt more at home there by sheer virtue of being loved by him. 

In a swampy corner of a park, we watched through tall reeds as a Canadian goose built her nest. She patted reeds flat with her feet – hopping around in a funny way that resembled dancing. We laughed. She didn’t notice. We wandered back through the Beeches along Queen and marvelled at Kew Gardens in bloom. The sight of the rich green grass and scent of the sweet blossoming trees felt like relief. How quickly I am willing to forget the pockets of my city that are perfectly peaceful. As lights began to flicker on in apartments, we pointed at particularly large bay windows and fantasized about building our own nest, someday, somewhere like this. In the gently dimming light, if I squinted, I could absolutely see it.