Saturated Landscape

My vantage point for some time now has been Montreal, third floor apartment, on the edge of a street where all the buildings are connected. My building is set on the top of a steep incline that descends into old Montreal, the Fleuve, and is adjacent to Park Lafontaine. There are rats sometimes below my pinnacle at night and squirrels during the day. The sky is always visible from my balcony.

On Remembrance Day, 2011, it was 7 degrees and partly cloudy. I was looking out the window from my third floor apartment. I saw the dark clouds hanging low overhead, and the grey sky blended in with the cold grey concrete. A saturated landscape that left a background where only melancholia and house chores seemed to fit in. The trees whipped around in a wintry wind, and although they still wore their gold leaves, without the sun they seemed menacing and dark, reminding me of the imminent cold that would soon envelop the city.

Only a few days earlier that week it had been 15 degrees. The sun had given off a delightful warmth in the afternoon even though it traveled across the sky in a low arc, visibly closer to the horizon than it had been all year. It shone through the yellow and red leaves of the maples giving Park Lafontaine a warm ethereal glow. I had basked in the sun that day, lying flat across the green grass letting its rays penetrate me with what felt like pure heavenly greatness.

Later, four days before Christmas, that day was but a distant memory. It was still balmy but the snow was competing with an icy rain. Orion was out in the sky in its full glory, coming higher and higher in the sky each night around nine o'clock when I'd sit on my back balcony and smoke.

Orion is a marker of the cold weather to come. Crisp clear winter nights are complete with its presence, like an old reliable friend. The stars in the constellation, although light years away, form a symmetrical arc seeming to be Orion's sinewy limbs outstretched, leaping through the sky. The Hunter fighting Taurus the Bull.

Then, later on in mid January, the snow fell and then fell some more, obscuring all visions of the cosmos. The trees are now sleeping, and I am trying to keep my feet warm, outside on my balcony. Sitting here with the peace of knowing that each season will return again and again with time.