At night the street is not more and not less silent, but the houses hum with the resonance of their few internal visible lights, a single light in a window seeming to suffice for an entire house. A door might suddenly open and a flood of light gush out on a landing to which winding stair rails lead in the darkness, the street lights being unobstrusive enough to preserve the anonymity of the street and its houses. A man and a woman come out and exchange a few words in which the following Saturday has a mention. His feet are already on the highest board of the stairway as he turns around, nods and descends. Ahead, at a corner that is illuminated and where cars are passing, two people walk arm in arm into a large bar that has only a small lit sign above its door but whose inner lights are of a sophisticated tangerine hue as seen through very thick panes. It is a Saturday and people are passing across zebra crossings and across front steps. A man chunky in his arms and lengthy in his legs walks to a heavy vehicle with a look of satisfaction; a pizza box is tucked under his left arm. There is a soft but insistent and lovable simmer in the quiet pursuit of diversion on this evening, it being not so cold as to dash the idea of a prolonged stroll in the open under a few stars.
Sometimes a bloated moon beams over the street, throwing the houses and their glinting roofs into drowsy fascination with pallid but cloying chalk-fire from the heavens. In looking back you see the moon hanging constant in the sky though the clouds that all bind their tresses together swirl and swipe at the vessel, at times obscuring it with devouring greed and then all at once releasing it. You can feel in you blood that, along the river that does not cease its susurrating flow in the night, a tranquil but majestic voyage is being made by this whole city upon a living island, and not only along the river, but also through a deeper space in the heavens such as comes to mind when the rippling clouds of the day whirl against a whitish blue sky and the city moves while your head is calm.
The silent street leads home from a bookshop on the street that you christen Tavern Street though it is not really a street of taverns. But it could easily be one, especially as it leads to the flank of the mountain and could make a befitting sojourn for the traveller. It slopes down and away from the mountain and directs itself towards the south of the island. Especially between the edge of the grassy park at the western corner and two original houses of worship, Tavern Street offers, with few exceptions, the looks of brick-fronted, sandy or brownish, straight-rising, triple storeys that are designed, so it seems, to house the traveller or the sojourner in ordinary but comfortable rooms. The lowest floor is, of course, given to a variety of boutiques and eateries such that the lights on that level shine brightly and invitingly in all times, making the mountain a near and attractive prospect rather than a feature in a distant countryside that has come up with only a few inns and other facilities for the traveller.
When the sun is declining and colouring itself away from its long and habitual white, the upper windows on the southern side of Tavern Street are caught in an effulgent shine that showers down additional light and warmth on the street, with the result that the day that is going to end in a couple of hours is in fact beginning again for this awakened street. It is always a bustling street full of attractions and cheers in a demurely but generous way. In summer the warm sun bounces off the silver, interval-ridged roof of the church whose lustrous steeple is visible far down the street when you are making the descent from the flank of the mountain. The church is the same as the one that is almost opposite the site of a seminary, which itself faces directly the station métro of Tavern Street.
It is cloudy and quiet for two days. Nothing moves in the sky except the onset of night. Sometimes the sky clears towards evening and the blue evening star appears in the presence of smoky, pale, brumal drifts passing to the east. Storms were forecast to arrive on Boxing Day from the Midwest down below, where they had begun to rage and pound. Then the forecast was changed to one of freezing rain (rain that freezes after falling). It did rain last night and today there are crystal drops upon the branches of the maple outside the window. The alley has two huge gulches running through it and, in between, a tossed up, inchoate rubble of dissolving snow-ice. As the aureate lamp blooms in the alley, you see high above to the left in a building of the colour of ecru two bared windows on successive floors; against the lower window, inside, a fir tree still sparkles in many colours though not as much as it did on Christmas Day, while the higher window has a tree that wounds white lights around itself to make a discernible, continuous rosary.
When twilight is well advanced and your thoughts have induced you to sleep, you open your eyes to realize that in the space of the few minutes for which the night has been alive, clouds have been stealing furtively upon the sky. In less even than a week from the winter solstice, the day is already beginning to lengthen but your own sleepy inner clock is prompting you to expect the gloaming at an earlier moment than the actual. You should know how to expect the caprices of this city, which is able to swing from one variety of the cosmos to another with such consummate ease as to leave itself no time for deserved compliments. You have seen sun and you have seen rain such as you have seen at other times and such as you might have seen in other lands. You have seen trees in all shapes and sizes imitating the trees of other lands in summer, while in winter brooding in expectation with corns upon their branches. You have seen flowers and grasses encapsulating the paysage of every corner of this earth that hides itself beyond its rounded horizons. There has been nothing excepted, nothing excluded in the physical moods of the city in which you live; you have often reproached yourself for not waking up to these moods and instead taking them for granted.
On another day, you take yourself out deliberately to be buffeted in a mini tempest of scratching snow, arresting wind and brown, silted gumboche. It is dark and faces pass you by in the snow, muffled and wary of the precarious slide when the body’s balance might not hold. You take the storm on an impulse, with a pretence to descend to the bibliothèque, change books and come up; but returning in that white duskiness in which the earth is gripped with a mantle of cold to keep it warm, you know that you needed to blink and steep yourself in the importunate brown and the slapping white to become conscious of your adherence to this world. You reaffirm your wish to find, for yourself, in this city and with these people, the nest or the cradle that you are looking for. It is a thought that enlivens you and you are willing to risk your luck in this city as in no other. In passing another face along a narrow slippery path through accumulated snow in the silence of the incipient evening, you have an impression of resolute hardiness of the soil from the features you momentarily behold, against which even the huddled, hibernating, heavy snow finds a match. In the feeling of victory inside you, there lives a thought that you have finally got what you deeply wanted.
A fine account of a Canadian street in winter … very evocative.