Plummetings

Yesterday, I heard the familiar thonk. It was one of the first horse chestnuts of the season, hitting the ground.

Ancient (and the odd recent) chestnut trees line our end of Cook Street, and over the next few weeks, the sidewalk will become somewhat hazardous, with green spiked chestnut shells and the round, smooth chestnuts rolling underfoot, and the near-misses from above.  (Not all of them miss.  Thonk.)

It's one of the signs that we've slipped past the equinox, along with the slanting sunlight that seems to vanish suddenly at dinnertime.  It's not sudden at all; we're past the 48th parallel here in Victoria, and twilights linger. It just seems abrupt after the long daylight hours of the vanished summer.

The tumbling chestnuts also remind me that we've been living at the condo for two years, during which we have never experienced a non-pandemic spring or summer, which includes Easter, most of the family birthdays (the exception being Demeter, whose birthday is in early February), Victoria Day, Canada Day, and Labour Day.

With this anniversary, we can look back on one Thanksgiving, one Hallowe'en, and one Christmas, untouched by plague protocols.

Time to prepare. And to watch my step.

Pest control

 

It's Tuesday, so there's a large infestation of cyclists on the patio of the coffee house.

My favourite table is available indoors, facing the window, which, for pandemic protocol reasons, is flung wide open all year round for ventilation, so I can hearing the bellowing fellowship outside, about a dozen feet away.  I take my seat philosophically.  They won't be there long.

As the group disperses, a bellowing fellow, having stood up, looks in the window as I happen to glance up.  I calmly avert my gaze, and resume my perusal of the journals on my table.  

I hear him muttering, but there's a mischievous edge to it.  I look up to see his head and shoulders silhouetted in the window, but I can make out the sly grin on his face.

I shake my head, and cheerfully thumb my nose at him.

The shop-owner is on counter-duty this morning, and is making her rounds, disinfecting the tables (another pandemic protocol).  

I barely resist the urge to tell her to squirt him.

Perspective

On a recent weekend, I was returning from an errand, in a blue funk. 

It had been cloudy for most of the day, so I had left my sunhat and sunglasses at home. Tired and footsore, I reached a busy intersection, and the sky cleared quite suddenly, and an overly warm sun, made muggy by the recent cloud-cover, hit me smack in the eyes. 

But that wasn't the reason for my misery. 

I was feeling closed in, burdened and crushed by things I needed to do, or thought I needed to do.  

As I made my miserable way down the hill, aiming for the leafy, shade-giving boulevard, I thought about the very latest I stayed in Victoria, out of the seventeen summers of respite during my exile in Hades -- September 4th.  Once.  We were usually hauled back to Hades by mid-August.

And it hit me.  It's September.  It's late September.  I'm not back in Hades, because I live here.  I have a bus pass, because I live here.

And I moved down the hill into our neighbourhood, near the old house where my daughters were little girls.  Children were playing, and a small knot of adults chatted on our old street. And I heard something I haven't heard in over two years:  music wafting on the breeze from a concert at the Cameron Bandshell in Beacon Hill Park, about a kilometre away.

And I was smiling.

The rock zoo

So I've left the coffee house after my early morning mocha, en route to set up Demeter's petit déjeuner. 

All summer, there's been a pile of rocks in a sort of cage on a bit of lawn by a house where the election awning is persistently being knocked over. Presumably, someone in the neighbourhood is anti-NDP, and might use the stones to throw as a political statement, something that's been happening lately in Canada. 

This morning, I notice that the rocks have been rearranged.

I gaze through the wire, and remember that the advance poll has just opened up down the street. Time to grab my voting card and ID, and cast my ballot, rather than a stone.

Update 11 Sep 2021: Closer examination reveal that two of the rocks read: "Worth More Standing" and "Go Away, Loggers", so I guessed this was about Fairy Creek. This morning, a hand-lettered sign had appeared on the cage, saying that this is an installation in protest of the rough treatment of anti-logger protesters.

Standing room only

For the first time in months, I shiver slightly, and battling my surprise, pull on my fleece jacket.  It's not even Labour Day yet.

I find myself remembering a very chilly morning in late January.  

A lady was standing by the coffee-house window counter, gazing out at the winter drizzle, as I set up my journals at my accustomed table, idly wondering why she'd chosen a spot within six feet of the tables.  

In those mid-pandemic days, the stools had been taken away from the raised counter, because they didn't work well with social distancing, nor with the constant sanitizing then required.  Still, if she wanted to stand at a counter, there was an identical one on the southern side, where, from May 2020 to May 2021, there were no tables at all.

I decided to ignore her, and strolled to the bar to pick up my mocha, and as I was setting it on my table, preparing to take my seat, one of the young baristas approached the lady and gently asked her to move.  She offered her a nearby table, saying something about the need to sanitize.

In response, the standing-room-only lady stalked out.  Clutching her coffee and sandwich, she glared back into the window that faced my table.  I gazed steadily back; she was clearly muttering about the injustice and embarrassment.

I then wondered if she thought I summoned the barista.

Chilled to the bone

During the numbing, rather frantic weeks that followed Demeter's fall, I found that my morning hour at the coffee house was my only oasis.  One late January dawn, I asked the barista what song was playing.  (Shazam, I've discovered, takes up too much space on my phone.)  I can't remember the song, but I do remember the barista's advice:  "Do you know you can just ask Siri?"

I rarely use Siri, but this was a god-send.  For the past eight months, I've been quietly muttering to my phone, as I scribble in my journals:  "Hey Siri, what's this song?"  

She'll answer:  "Hang on, listening." Or, "Name that tune."

So far as I know, she's only been wrong once, although, occasionally, she has to say, "Sorry, I don't recognise that."

Lately, I've been making an effort to identify music I loathe.  Moka House, much to its credit, runs a variety of playlists, and every now and then, the music will bore me, and bore into me, encouraging me to drink up and leave.  I figure it's just as important to know what I don't like.  Sometimes it's a surprise.

I was astonished to learn that I hate the Arctic Monkeys, because I've heard them on television, and didn't think I minded them that much.  Last week the coffee shop either played an album or a playlist of the group, and it set my teeth on edge.

However, usually the track I can't stand is by an artist unfamiliar to me.  I note the title and artist and look 'em up.  Similar terms keep popping up:  "chillwave", "chillhop", and often in the same sentence, "lofi".

"Lofi"?  Wait a minute...

About a dozen years ago, I began to be aware that a number of my favourite restaurants were putting me off my food with, what was to me, irritating, repetitive, thunk-thunk sort of music.  In both Hades and Victoria, as well as, I presume, many cities, eateries were being pervaded by this stuff, which, frankly, made my ears itch.  Finally, on a quiet afternoon in Cook Street Village, I asked our server what the hell was playing.  (I may have used different words.  I hope so.)

She explained to me that it was a type of music called "low fidelity", and it was supposedly designed to be an unobtrusive listening experience.  In fact, she said, one of the local bakery/coffee shops used the same music service.  I made a mental note not to go there.

When I got home, I googled "low fidelity" and "dining music".  Nuthin'.

Two years later, I have the answer:  it's "lofi" -- or "chill".

Shudder.