IT’S MAY IN TORONTO and I’ve signed up to attend Swift Night Out without realizing that it’s half-day Friday at work. I have an entire afternoon to while away in the city.
In her essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” Virginia Woolf uses the excuse of needing a new pencil to set off on a walk across London. It’s mine and my husband’s second wedding anniversary on Monday. A gift of cotton, then, is my pencil. In Woolf’s essay, it is winter and dark, but in my present, spring has finally come to the city after a long Ontario winter of snow, ice, and freezing temperatures. The streets feel busier today. People walk around with skin exposed, coats slung over their arms. The sun gleams off glass buildings.
For me, it has been a long, dark winter of pregnancy-induced nausea and fatigue that is finally starting to wear off. I place my hand on my midriff and admire my rounding belly in shop windows. I too am coming alive again.
I head through the museum district with its flagstone sidewalks, past the double facade of the Royal Ontario Museum – one side, Italianate architecture in yellow brick, the other, a spiked “crystal” of glass, aluminum, and steel. I walk through the university campus, where empty green lawns stretch out and tourists pose next to statues. Then I turn onto College Street, where cars, pedestrians, streetcars, and cyclists jostle for space on the roads and sidewalks, and cafes and boutiques sit companionably next to
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Naomi Racz is originally from the UK and has a master’s degree in writing, nature and place from the University of Exeter. They were a founding editor of Stonecrop Review, a literary magazine focusing on urban nature, which ran for five issues. Their writing has appeared in MUTHA Magazine, FieldFare, The Learned Pig and Literary Mama. Naomi has lived in Amsterdam and Toronto and now lives on Vancouver Island with their partner, two small children and one dog. www.naomiracz.com