November 3

A couple weeks ago I had dinner with an old friend of mine who was in the city on business.

The last time we saw each other was over a year ago, and I was visiting her. I turned off the Trans-Canada and into town just in time to sit down with her family for dinner – pork tenderloin, corn and green beans, noodles. There was ice cream for dessert. Her sons, who were just a toddler and a newborn when first we met, are now young men, pushing six feet. I tried not to stare; tried not to repeat too many variations of "You used to be so small..." I wasn't particularly successful on either count, I don't think.

When we finished eating, we headed out again; out across the highway and into the countryside, to the dairy farm where her younger son boards his 4-H calf. It started to rain. I was wearing just a t-shirt, a denim skirt, slip-on Keds; I was completely unprepared. They managed not to laugh out loud at me as I tip-toed across the barnyard, slipping and sliding through the cow manure, or when I recoiled from the attentions of the dozens of curious barn cats. When the thunder and lightning started, I bolted for the car, secretly happy for a legitimate excuse to seek refuge from all that mess, all that life.

Home again, she and I stayed up late, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea from the old Pyrex tea pot and talking. The house was dark. The only illumination was from the fixture over the sink; the light spilled onto the floor in a golden pool. The streetlight out the window glowed sodium orange. We talked past midnight. We had a lot of catching up to do.

We had a lot of catching up to do this time, too. As I rode the rush-hour train downtown to meet her at her hotel, I thought about our last visit: how the town where I'd once lived had felt simultaneously so familiar and so strange to me. How I'd driven past my old apartments, peered into the window of my old office, walked the old familiar campus paths. How I'd watched that teenage boy work with his calf, and how confident and self-assured he'd been, and how somehow his calf had looked better, more special, than all the rest. How later, retelling the story of my farm visit to my friends at work, I'd watched them lift their feet off the floor in sympathetic dismay, imagining the mud and the manure, and how then I'd laughed, recognizing myself in them; recognizing the city-mouse caricature that I'd become.

We walked up Yonge Street to my favourite local pub. I'd estimated it would only take us twenty minutes, but it was more than half an hour. I'd forgotten how much there is to look at when you're seeing it for the first time. How bright the lights are; how many people there are; how close and loud and crazy they all seem. She pointed out businesses I'd forgotten existed. She asked questions about things I'd never wondered about, and questions I wasn't sure I had the answer to.

"How do you do it?" she asked. And "Do you like it here?" I hesitated too long before answering.

Once again we talked for hours. We had salads in order to justify the giant plate of fries. No dessert. The light was dim, but the space heater behind us was hard at work, so the pub was warm and cozy. The other tables filled and emptied, but we stayed on, until the fries were almost all gone and it was finally time to go. We caught the subway back downtown; it was full of the usual late-night characters, and there were empty paper cups and plastic bottles and discarded newspapers on the floor. In the darkened windows I caught a glimpse of my city-mouse self, operating in her element, navigating a different kind of mess, a different kind of life.

We hugged in the hotel lobby and went our separate ways. It will probably be a year before we see each other again, even though a year is too long. In the days since then, I keep hearing her voice asking me, "How do you do it? Do you like it here?" And then I hear the echo of my hesitation.

But this morning I rode the streetcar to work and I had my answer. Queen Street is quiet first thing on a Sunday morning, and the air was crisp and the sky was blue and there was time enough to walk to the coffee shop to buy a muffin from the guy with the wire-rimmed glasses who knows all the neighbourhood kids by name. I tucked the muffin into my bag and headed east, walking past the park, into the sun. Something about the light made me look up, and I saw those trees, and that lamp post, and the blue blue sky, and I smiled. I do like it, most of the time. It's like anything. You just have to know where to look.

November 2

A grey day today: glowering skies, wind whipping through the trees, and rain that varied from a romantic Scotch mist to the sort of driving force that somehow forces water up your sleeves as you walk home, despite the best efforts of your umbrella and your mittens and the general principles of gravity. 

After a long, mild fall, the trees in my neighbourhood are finally shedding their leaves, and I'm predicting many bare branches by Monday morning. Walking home tonight in the gloaming, I saw the Japanese maple on the corner practically glowing in the dark; the pale hydrangea three doors down were almost iridescent, beads of water on every petal, shimmering in the light from the front porch. The people next door have a new golden retriever puppy, a cheerful, bumbling ball of fluff who doesn't seem to mind the weather at all. I should be so lucky.

And so tonight, a comfort-food dinner: a hearty slice of country bread, layered with bright green kale (simmered in chicken stock with a bit of tomato paste and some sautéed onions stirred in), and topped with a fried egg. One pan, one bowl, one fork, one knife; simple but deeply satisfying. Rice pudding seems like the natural follow-up, but tonight ice cream filled the bill. We're on the cusp of winter; there will be many other nights for a dessert cooked low and slow, filling the house with the scents of vanilla and nutmeg. I'll save it for another, colder day.

November 1

A year ago today, I stood on the beach in Napier, New Zealand, and watched the waves roll in. It was early afternoon, and the sun was high overhead. The sky and the water seemed endlessly blue.

I had woken up that morning on the other side of the island and driven cross-country for almost four hours. I crossed from lush forest, thick with ferns, to meadowed valleys, where gorse crowded the roadside. I wound my way up and down mountainsides, my cautious Canadian nature balking at the 120 km/hour speed limit on the precipitous two-lane mountain roads. Whenever I could, I pulled over to let people pass, although I pretended that I was getting out of the car to look at the sheep.

The fact that I can't find any pictures of sheep is probably revealing.

I got to Napier and checked into my hotel. That day I was supposed to join my tour group, half a dozen other writers, but I found myself wanting to prolong my solitude. I begged off lunch and headed into town, where I bought an apple and a homemade granola bar from a health-food store and a latte from the coffee shop next door. I'd been travelling on my own for five days and my head was swimming from too much time alone and an incipient head cold, but I found some comfort in the fact that the health-food store smelled familiar: sandalwood and nutritional yeast and paper bags. Some things don't change, whatever the hemisphere. The smell of the health-food store, the shape of the lid on my takeaway cup, the taste of the hot, frothy milk – each carried their own brand of familiar reassurance.

The walk down to the water took less than five minutes. I crossed the promenade, skirted the band shell and hopped a low tide wall onto the shingled beach. The gravel crunched beneath my boots and the sun glared down; there were girls in bikinis, hopeful, watching the surfers, but the breeze was cool enough that I was moved to wrap myself more tightly in my scarf. I sat on a driftwood log to eat my snack, and I watched the waves, and I thought about "my" ocean, the Atlantic, and wondered if I'd ever seen it so blue.

After a while, I pushed the apple core into the empty paper cup and stood up to walk back. On the way, I looked for rocks – striped pebbles, my favourite – and tried to fix those moments in my mind.

(More about Napier, the Art Deco capital of the world.)