<\/p>\n
From the window you can see sombre cloud ranged in the stuffing of the sky. The cloud gives an impression that it is bouncing in its place to get ready to present moist bits of itself to the very quiet but watching earth below. The snow does come very soon. It continues all day and into the night. When you walk out to get the morning papers from the station m\u00e9tro<\/i> there is already a pleasantly crunching covering on the ground, and you step gingerly on the sidewalk and into a shortcut alley. The snowflakes are whirling in the air at cross-purposes but there are larger, single flakes that fall more steadily. They settle into the cracks of the road to demarcate in plain vividness a honeycomb of arteries that surely lead somewhere. Almost lighting the steeple of the church on one of the principal streets, the sun is a watchful glow behind a shroud that is not of its making.<\/p>\n
Your collar is splattered and wetness spreads on the surface of your coat. You want to hurry to get back into your room. You are surprised to see that hardly anyone else is in a mood to hurry. In fact, people are slowing their steps and looking at the incrusting fall with smiles on their faces. When you come back quickly with the papers and turn into the sidewalk of your street you cross someone who is walking with supreme confidence in the opposite direction; the furry hood of the parka is drawn up and inside it there is a glowing smile that, while being cast down, is both self-regarding and other-regarding. You say to yourself this is a warm city.<\/p>\n
There is an interval in the day when the flakes become fewer and they make dots in the air that may soon vanish. The outermost creamy building with galleries outside the window is enshrouded in dim mistiness. The branches of the pine are being caked over with enveloping, protecting arms. A docked doggie comes out of the gate opposite and rushes to jump in the snow with unbound delight before he is fetched inside by his master. Soon the flakes tumble down more determinedly and with no surcease. Two schoolboys walk jauntily past the window with hoods raised. They are small in size and no more than ten years in age; the one closest takes a joint from the other and begins to lift it to his lips. The joint is heavy and the paper is creased and twisting. They think that no one is seeing them close. The snow invites a contribution to dampness and has a suggestion of later gooeyness. A man comes up to the garage and pisses for long at the side of the door. He has a relieved grin on his face when he turns.<\/p>\n
You go out in the evening in the bus that travels along an east-west street from the station m\u00e9tro<\/i>. There are very few people today even during the rush hour. The snow is falling relentlessly but not heavily. In the headlights of the cars and before the windscreen of the bus it appears like rain you have seen for many years. You need to remind yourself that this is snow. Some of the mansions on the street have the long path of their steps lit softly by Christmas lights. Illuminated posies hang in the company of silent balconies, bay windows and conical towers. Some of the firs close to the sidewalk are illuminated. Snow is piling up widely, swelling and making cornices, burying all the black, desiccated vegetation on the ground save for the most outward of long, cernuous leaves.<\/p>\n
The bus moves slowly. Slurry is building on the road, cyclists are hurrying into the path of the bus, and some people are furiously brushing off the sleeping coat on their cars parked alongside the kerb. Under the impact of wheels the snow on the road dances up convulsively and fragments before sinking back in another progress towards the sludge that will make more than one habitant grimace much later. The lantern lights of the Ritz Carlton shine inviting bright through the drizzle, falling upon a deserted sidewalk; the entire building is lighted but all the inhabitants have left for a journey. The snow cradles, nestles and curdles against the walls of the houses and only one or two blanketed figures step out of their homes to make a valiant countering effort with their shovels. In the overwhelming physical presence of this white blanket upon which the little, bright lights of the coming festival of joy are playing, as well as in the dark but faithful walls of, again, physically warm rooms with closed doors, there is a whole new world that you resolve to keep always wondrously new as you find it. At night you sleep with the window curtain parted to avoid being tricked in the morning into thinking that the night is prolonged. The illumination of the post lamp of the alley is so backstaged by its own lusty reflections from the breathing snow mounds that it seems the window is all shining on its own.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When the city is under snow it is not easy to remember the looks it sported in the time of sun and green. You need to force yourself to think that memory is not being perfidious in suggesting that here in these thickly decked albuminous locales there lay whole stretches of lush lawn and overhanging vegetation when you passed by some months ago. Sometimes you think that whole parts of neighbourhoods and large grounds have vanished never to appear again. The sun declines in the sky and shines weakly but bravely in a sheen of joyful, patchy yellow, against which a fir is silhouetted in the manner of a palm tree with sleeved arms. The snow lights up and says \u201cBon courage\u201d to the watcher in retreat from the window or the huddling waiter at the bus stop. As the bus turns past the edge of the mountain the children and adults hurtling down the snow slope upon all manner of contrivances are lost to view, but not long after, from the back of the bus, there comes to view, far above all the unyielding snow, an uncovered steeple of tapering belvederes that shines in a perennial warmth. Outside, it is immensely cold but the air gives to you a vigour in making your lungs distend to their fullest to flow the fluid in your veins. There is no wearying in the open unless the damp grasp of the thriving cold reaches into your lips, cheeks and jaws and freezes them or makes your eyes and nose water more than they should.<\/p>\n
Yet there are days even in such a season when the sun is up in a sky where the blue is striking and when, even if the eyes are smarting, you do not relent in your quick strides on a sidewalk across frozen slabs of ice that formerly were an overlap of powdery snow. You are in a silent street and soon you will come within rows of houses with many a beetling brow. The translucent, shapeless slabs at the feet are mottled and they bury in themselves odd twigs from the denuded trees that outmatch the houses in number. Across a space within a gate to the left a bicycle is chained in a terrace, and behind the terrace the silvern azure of the sky appears in apposite contrast with the coaly, extending branches of a tree that almost cover a little chimney. Again, silence dominates the scene. In that silence there is a simple emphasis of the blue and the black that tell you of a dream or sighting you must have had once and thrilled to, so that you cannot really say that you are in a land where you never were before.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
On the bare tree of the sidewalk ahead prominent berries cling to the boughs, but these are not fleshy berries though they look rounded and real; they are the stiff loci of new growth when the leaves come back. The tree grows to the height of a long but narrow balcony of fresh wood over the wide, deserted door of the house that comes after the gate. You think home cannot be more embracing in a quiet excitement than this, but there is no flutter, no movement, no sound, no clink, no voice anywhere. An old lady, or rather a lady old in age but active in manner, is coming along in a long black coat that reaches just above her knees; the coat is loosely sashed and, with a gamboge walking stick that she grasps in its middle, she is tapping the snow that has melted and is now freezing in amorphous heaps on the street side of the sidewalk. Under the look of the silent houses whose steps are encroached upon by the spread and whose basement windows are only just free of it, you say \u201cBonjour\u201d to each other in the conscious closeness of sharing a moment apart from the rest of the world.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Ahead, on the cleared front steps of a house with a path and a yard, a thinking squirrel is hesitating in a pirouette and then standing still with raised forepaws in an assurance that suggests that the house has always belonged to her. Just above the layer of the white shroud in the yard that must warm the ground below with its heavy crush instead of chilling it, a brown stalk peers out and exhibits three fading peonies at its bending end. Other stems thrust out singly and carry axial fluffs that have long since closed on themselves or they bear long, thin leaves that wilt but refuse to drop. You eyes go up to the sloping roof enclosing a pediment over a colonnaded porch, a pediment that imitates a gable upon the lateral, bi-dormered roof of a two-storey house with framed oriels on its sandy ballooned sides. A certain notion keeps turning over in your mind, a notion of how from the depths of a city washed in sun and snow a stimulus can run up to the bulging lobes of the cerebrum to create a lasting impulse to excel or perform in a manner not matched elsewhere. It is an uncommon leavening.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 m\u00e9tro of Tavern Street.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s balance might not hold. You take the storm on an impulse, with a pretence to descend to the biblioth\u00e8que, 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.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Immigrant\u2019s Conquest in the Snowy City From the window you can see sombre cloud ranged in the stuffing of the sky. The cloud gives an impression that it is bouncing in its place to get ready to present moist bits of itself to the very quiet but watching […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":193,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-637","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1476,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/637\/revisions\/1476"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}