I flung my windows wide today for the first time in weeks. I had come back from a walk–in Park Lafontaine, sitting on a cleared bench, snow almost at seat-level, the sun was too bright for me to look anywhere, I had had to squint away from the sky, the snow, the undersides of branches glancing white in reflected glory. It was too bright even with my eyes closed. A pigeon grazed ten feet from my ear, the flap of its wing folding like canvas, like the door of a wall tent untied in the March breezes up north. Immediate, sharp: sounds no longer stifled by smog, cold, and shuttered buildings, but unfurling like an open wing.

It was fabulous, if just for twenty minutes, to have the breezes from miles away, from beyond Montreal island, chase through the open windows into my room. For the neighbourhood itself to stream in with the light: the scrape of shovels on sidewalks, rattlings and footfalls of passersby, even the swish of wheelwells splattering through puddles at our streetcorner.