2. Passing The Solstice In Burlington
In Bronte Creek Park, the baby spruce trees, planted during early summer, are the only green awakening this shortest day of the year. Alone in a barren world of overcast skies and withered grass, they barely look as though they could survive the winter, just now starting. But no one knows what might live or die as a new year opens. Not all the mallards hatched in the spring will return from the Gulf of Mexico to mate where they were born. And how many squirrels will perish in their nests of dried leaves?
The water on Burlington Bay is choppy, while Cootes Paradise is a frozen sheet of unblemished white. The snow-covered ice invites walkers, but is far too fragile to support even a toddler. It is like the self we develop to explain ourselves to others, to conceal — even from ourselves — who we really are. One errant footstep and when it crumbles we plunge into unknown waters.
The young mallards fly deep into a southland they have never seen where some will fall to predators or disease. What part of their minds knows how to migrate? Darkness arrives in late afternoon this far north. To stand under a winter’s sky without moon or stars is to stand between the waters of mystery and the invisible heaven we long for but cannot know.
