(from Sunday, this post but I wanted to check before posting the link)

oh so many months ago my friend the golden boy returned from Burning Man, and from three splendid weeks driving the desert, the Oregon shore, and the little beads of rural islands (farms! art!) strung together by small ferries, linking the wild Washington coast with Puget Sound.

He returned to his job in Vancouver, as a supportive housing worker for just-off-the-streets clients with mental health and addiction issues, and one afternoon found himself curled up in a ball on the floor of his office. After a decade of front-line work, suddenly, he was done. He quit his job, shed all his possessions, and moved into his van.

He’s been madly happy. And so free. Almost every day he posts a photo of where he’s made his home. This morning it’s a community garden overlooking the city’s east side. Daffodils! Crocuses. Woodchips and cherry blossoms. Raised beds and woven willow fences, knee-high .

I used to work in Kitsilano, with just such a garden out back of my office. I’d wander out at lunch and sit on a swaying wooden bench, chickadees flickering through the cypress trees, the sky a pale cyan with high small clouds, dew evaporating off the overwintered kale and chard, and the soil–insulated with layers of straw–breathing moisture into the fresh day. The ocean was close enough to bleach the garden stakes and fenceposts (just indirectly, salt in the fog). A little cob house, all curves, got built in one corner during the years that I worked there. The wrought iron garden gate was fashioned from an amazing fusion of gardening implements–shovel, trowel, pitchfork, all kinds of things.

Beyond the garden, the way down to Zulu (I sure miss Zulu records, where not only could you listen to any CD, but they had at least a dozen listening stations of new music, each a different genre, and each with about 15 CDs), was all cherry blossoms and flowering magnolias, petal bursts bigger than my hand. A community garden ran all along the railroad tracks just beside my building, with little tile mosaics and wooden chairs, watering cans and trowels tucked along the lovingly tended path.

I used to have good talks with the chief gardener. She gave me cherry tomato plants, and advice on growing basil in a cool climate. Her name was Spring.

I can’t believe that the cherry blossoms have been out since January this year; that the daffodils and crocuses are almost done, that I called my mom a week ago and she was out in the garden, pruning.

Here in Montreal it’s dry and just barely zero. I’m going to put my laundry on the clothesline today, to dry stiff and frozen while I glide off towards my favorite hour: skating in the sunlight on the pond in Jarry Park.

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