200703 summer

Friday the 3rd

  Wednesday was the unofficial start of summer. School was out (in some "virtual reality"!) and Canada Day was here. With all the gatherings that didn't and won't happen all summer, and the holiday plans we were discussing in February brushed off the table in March, I am disconcerted or disoriented, as if we have side-slipped into an alternate universe where everywhere everything is toxic. It only hit me last week that our summer trip is gone. K and I had hoped to go and see Rain and Elf et al, and catch a Cirque de Soleil show in Trois Rivieres. The last stop was Perce Rock on the Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec. (Bucket list)  Elf was to dance in the Cirque show, but it was cancelled along with all her other dance projects. (Cirque plans to mount the show next summer.)

  K said in April, "what if this goes on for two years? we will need plans in place." Now, heading into summer in earnest, Captain Covid is still on the warpath. As each state and country re-opens the virus ramps up again. Vaccines are still in the works, drug tests are only beginning and we are still discovering how the virus even works. So we settle in for the long haul, and, though I prided myself on coping, and although we have had it easy compared to many families in Canada, I confess I am done. I want a holiday, without kids, without meals to plan and cook, without groceries to pick up and sanitize, even without my mosaics. I don't know how many days I would  need. "If I had a boat, I'd go out on the ocean." (Lyle Lovett) 

On the sunnier side...

  I love Toronto summers, yes! heat, hot roads, brown-grass lawns until September . My mother loved the summer (and the winter) because, coming from England, she had experienced neither extreme, and I appreciate summer because she did. I don't deny myself air conditioning, though we grew up without it in house or car! I think ac is wonderful, allowing us to relish the heat and sweat and sun but retreat to sanity-preserving coolness to sleep. Toronto in the summer brings childhood memories of endless barefoot dusty days, catching frogs, riding everywhere! In the undeveloped field behind the park there was a circuit of dirt tracks made by kids on bikes. The park was across the road from us and had dangerous marvelous red-painted wooden swings  We even had a creek minutes away on our bikes (the frogs). Dads (It was long ago) did fireworks displays up and down the street on July 1, and we played with little, and not-so-little, red firecrackers which we lit with our own punk! We were kids! But my father grew up in a little Saskatchewan town where he had a dog but no collar or leash, a gun for shooting gophers and a swimming hole for a community pool, so he raised us with a loose hand. (Or a long leash, if you will.) The Canadian National Exhibition (the Ex to us) happened way at the far end of the summer and was the saving grace of September's approach. Every year, we never missed. And the air tasted of cotton candy and hotdogs and hot trash. Labour Day weekend was a strange miracle of three extra days of summer, because with school, unofficially, came fall.

Have a pleasant and safe summer. (I'll be around!)