Shirley of the North

Happy Solstice! Welcome to the longest night of the year …

I’ve never lived with a view before and I find it tremendously soothing. Right now I am looking out the way far left corner of the picture windows, over three tall, narrow houses, perhaps of a 1930’s vintage, which are perched at the top of a hill opposite the park. Behind them, semi-derilict apartments and industrial zoned lands fall away, down to the enormous cement granaries of the port — but all I really see are the peaked roofs of these houses (San Francisco style, narrow and long and aligned each like the other: covered porch on the first floor, two large windows facing out from the second story, the attice a small one-window triangle; each window painted with white or white and green piping to contrast with the house), and extending out behind them the back end of Stanley Park, a dark green tongue of forest reaching into the silver-backed sea. The houses are like the house my great-aunt and great-uncle lived in from the 1950’s through to the end of my childhood, and looking at them –bars of water, a foreground of forest, and rising above that the indistinct indigo of the headlands of the north shore — is a glimpse into the Vancouver of another, earlier century, when this city was surrounded by forest and rose out of the fog.

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