I walked home with my curls peeking out from under my new nineteen-twenties-ish hat, their yellow tips frosted with snow.
I skipped from the streetcar stop across the grass in front of the Queensway appartment buildings and waved at the infirm woman standing in the lobby in her slippers with her face pressed against the window.
My heart was ten tonnes lighter as I realized that this year I will see snow.
Before my birthday, even.
A couple of weeks ago as the Mon(s)treal contingent wrote me beautiful, lilting emails about the first snowfall, I was struck by an irrational sadness, thinking that I would never see white streets again unless I was off on some alpine vacation somewhere, that I would never traipse through the purity of a stark landscape without paying for it somehow, buying a theatre ticket for snow.
This afternoon as we wandered out of Kitty's favourite vintage shop, a ludicrously underpriced dress under one arm and the softest, furriest bell-hat tucked firmly onto my head, the sky dusted our eyelashes with fat white flakes and we left the first footprints of the afternoon along Roncesvalles as we headed for the King Streetcar.
This evening as Kitty and I sat in her favourite tortilla place sipping beer and discussing the significance of the clown as a principal character in Leoncarlo's Il Pagliacci (which I'm seeing next Saturday!), the wind whipped past our cubbyhole and we sat for hours roaming from our insecurities to our proudest moments, telling stories of the french riviera and this perfect little pub down in Boston.
As we ventured out, chins sticky with blue cheese and arms filled with treasures, we stopped in the centre of the sidewalk gazing at white-topped cars, the thick intersection rendered so much less threatening by so simple a coating of flakes.
I wandered home, skipping outside my skin, head filled with too many things but with a space, an all important space, reserved for the sudden purity of the universe.
Sitting here in my new blue pinstriped designer (but affordable) silk pyjamas, cozy and content, I am plotting nefarious schemes to carry my book onto his side of the bed (at least until he gets home and squishes me) so that I can look up every few moments to make sure that the trees are still wearing their beautiful snowy dressing gowns.
And if this ruins my plans to plant that second row of tulips and the inner row of crocuses, I'll put the bulbs in the freezer and consider planting them in the spring, and sit on the front stoop and sigh into the snowflakes, singing them songs that only old friends would remember.