A lone deer at the edge of a field about 100 metres from the highway. A group of men watched from the side of the road. They didn’t look like nature lovers.

A teenaged girl sitting alone on a playground swing, smoking. Something about her made me think she’d secretly welcome someone saying hello, but I wasn’t sure, didn’t want her to think I thought she looked sad and lonely. So I said nothing. That she stays with me makes me wonder if I erred on the wrong side of cautious…

Four silver pails hanging on the trunk of a front yard maple. (I want a front yard maple!)

Some yutz in a silver car with tinted windows who pulled out of his driveway in front of me without looking. I could smell rubber from how hard I braked and swerved in order to miss him. Some choice words tossed about on my part, though his windows were safely rolled up.

First robin of Spring!

Geraniums blooming in the window of a gas station that’s been owned by two brothers for twenty-five years. The kind of place where they pump your gas and chat about the weather and tell you there’s been a gas station on that site since the 1920’s; they clean your windshield and check your oil and have hydraulic lifts and tools and if you drive in with a flat, they can fix it.

Workers in orange overalls taking down an orange snow fence along the cornfield I pass every day, which has recently become a temporary pond—so realistic it’s attracted a family of geese and a few vacationing swans.

I see that the early morning fisherman who park under the overpass near the creek are back and I wonder what it is they fish for and I try to catch a glimpse of them, which I have never done, and then I see a giant new pot hole in the road… too late.

An older couple in a green van eats lunch and throws bits of things to seagulls at the lake. When the guy notices me watching, he smiles, starts showing off, tries tossing the bits so that the birds will catch them mid-flight. When they do, he looks at me, beams like he’s just performed a circus act, like maybe I should applaud. Take a picture of that, lady…

A young lad, fifteen maybe, sits on the edge of a bench at the library, earbuds in place, arms resting like dumbells on thighs, body hunched forward as he texts madly, seemingly unaware that his bright blue plastic library card is in his mouth…

A full grown deer dead at the side of the road. Police and animal control people hover. I don’t stop, don’t want to intrude, appear nosy. How stupid. Because I’d like to know what happened, pay my respects. It’s a stretch of road where speed couldn’t have been an issue. But what else? Who would intentionally hurt a deer? I keep seeing that beautiful face, the lolling tongue.

A girl, maybe four years old in a pink snowsuit, lets go of her mum’s hand and lies down next to the sidewalk where the snow is thin and crusty and streaked with black from cars. She flaps arms and legs in a vain attempt to make an angel. Her mum doesn’t stop her, doesn’t fuss about black snow; just stands and watches and laughs. Lucky girl.

I see two crows shouting the odds outside my window, and bird breath—little puffs of steam with every caw-caw. 

An employee at the Salvation Army store goes through books on the shelves, now and then tossing one into a cardboard box… I watch as Nora Roberts’ Summer Pleasures is pitched. Thwunk. She sees me looking and says some stories are not compatible with Salvation Army principles.
Sex? I venture. Or just bad writing? 
Sex, she says, her face screwed up in disgust.
How can you tell which ones have it?
She reads the back, she says, sometimes she has to read more, she just gets a feeling, god directs her to the steamy ones.
She seems to enjoy her work.
 

Note: do not look for this potboiler at your local Sally Ann.

A ginger-haired guy with a wild beard, wearing a blue plaid lumberjacket, black toque not covering his ears, grey backpack, sneakers, riding a green bike. Surely to god he must have gloves, but I don’t notice. I just sit there at the red light watching, thinking he must be nuts— why ride in sub zero?  Then later I see a guy in a grey hoodie with something white and thermal looking underneath, also on a bike, and I think: hmm, maybe there’s something in this.

—A mouse runs across the front porch. A rare thing in winter and I wonder why this one has ventured from its nest—a nest I picture from some childhood book as being pink and pillowy, stitched together from nibbled bits of towel left outside in summer and filled with sparrow feathers, dust and mop fluff. Must have run out of cheese. There’s no other reasonto leave such a nest.

—A dog, a kind of long limbed beagle, gallops unleashed down the sidewalk holding a quart container of chocolate milk in its mouth. I can’t tell if it’s full or empty or frozen. It doesn’t seem to matter.

—Outside the library a mother pulls two toddlers in a wagon with one hand while with the other she holds onto a child in a lemon coloured snowsuit. She lifts each in turn into a minivan, straps them into seats, then hoists the wagon through the back door. The wind blows hair all around her face and her cheeks are bright red. She isn’t wearing gloves. You can’t fasten tiny people into buckles and straps with gloves.

—At the nursing home I see the woman I always see who visits her mum the same time I visit mine. She’s often carrying a basket of wet laundry, which she once told me she takes home to hang on the line, to give it that fresh scent, the kind of smell nursing homes tend to run short on. But it’s minus twenty today so as we pass I say: You’re not going to hang that outside are you?

And she says: Of course I am. I’m from Saskatchewan. 

— toddler’s blue booted feet dancing in silent but uncontainable excitement as his stroller was pushed toward the door of Scholar’s Choice.

— black and white dog who began pacing on the back seat of a navy blue car, eyes bright as its person approached with a bag of kibble under her arm.

— man in a red beret riding a green bike with a red paisley suitcase strapped to the back.

— nickle from 1945 at the place I buy fresh apple juice; the customer before me had given it in payment and the cashier was thrilled and showed it to me and I was thrilled too and we both wondered for a moment about the nickle’s travels in the past sixty-five years. Or maybe it hadn’t been anywhere, maybe it had been kicking around the same old neighbourhood all that time. It would be interesting to track coins the way we track geese.

Speaking of which—I saw a herd of geese, or maybe ducks, resting in a sunny pond on one side of the road. The kind of scene that will occasionally make me stop, take a breath, and even though it’s just geese and/or ducks and water and reeds and sky—all of which is so easy to take for granted—the brilliant simplicity of it all, the way nature somehow continues to work so perfectly despite…well, us—it always, always fills me with wonder.

On the other side of the road was this…

Which also fills me with wonder. In a different way…

~