Our Regularly Scheduled Program

This morning I went for a run along the river, and saw two of my favourite birds.

First though, I ran through the flocks of Canada geese, which generally I don't much love. But the goslings are half-growed now, gangly teenagers in fluffy dirty gold coats. The birds are so used to humans down there by the river that they sit on the path, two birds here, three there, one loner a little ways down, 8 goslings all in a clump. Every once in a while, one may turn its beady eye on you and give you a little hiss, but otherwise you're darting from right to left around them and timing your steps to miss their shit.

To get my sleepy body warmed up, I walked a few more minutes than I normally do, taking me a little further than I normally go. Instead of turning at the first tree past the sign for Parkdale Ave, I rounded the corner past the tree, you know that one, the one where the river widens and spreads out in front of you? It's the seagull apocalypse there right now, all screeching and wheeling and diving for mayflies like it's the end of the world.

I turned around, and the graceful dipping neck of a great blue heron caught my eye.

There are three birds that remind me of my grandparents' house: hawks, kildeer, and great blue herons. They have a special place in my heart, all of them, imbued with happy family memories.

So I stopped, jogged in place a few moments, watched the bird pick its way down to a rock right in the water as it stalked something below the river's surface. I was hoping to watch it make the kill, because it is always impressive to watch beings do what they do best. But the prey must have disappeared, doing what it does best, and the heron turned its back on me, the white and black v slick down the back of its head, opened its grand wings to their widest and awkwardly flapped back up onto land.

I kept on moving home, through the already unbearable humidity.

Twenty seconds from the end of my playlist, a kildeer cut a jagged swath across the path, up over the stone wall to my right and down to the creek that comes out of nowhere and goes someplace else.

Life is just a good place to be right now, these past few days. I think I've managed to convince a certain cute Californian that he needs to visit Canada's capital this summer. I got a Mysterious Package from a Mysterious Person that rendered me speechless and hungry. Saw some good rock and roll with a good group of people last night. Lolled on the grass in Westboro to watch a great reading by Jennifer. Had a satisfying chat with Shelley, wherein we commiserated about how being in between houses sucked and how we couldn't wait to live together.

Now I’m half naked under the fan, the bath water slowly evaporating. J. and I are going for sushi, and I’m going to have wakame, which for me is the kale of Japanese food. After that, J. and I will get foxified, hit the Babylon Club, drink some beer and tipsy-traipse our way home. Maybe it will be raining and we’ll get wet. We probably won’t care.