Vanishing

The one remaining payphone in Union station. 

January and February dumped a lot of snow on Toronto, so spring's arrival is more of a visual show than normal. Huge snow banks laboriously built with shovels shrink in the warm sun, vanishing by some fixed arrangement with the laws of physics.

Melted snow banks made it easier to get around on this Friday's bout of campaigning with Dianne Saxe. We were canvassing College Street and Montrose, the heart of Little Italy.   

There was only one purpose-built multi-unit building on our route, and the rest were houses, either home to the people who had lived there for fifty years, or home to seven people who wouldn’t stay there a year, or home to more recent owners who had finally found a house they could afford in Toronto.

To sum up our afternoon:

Making her way up the shared driveway, Dianne said hello to a woman, whom I'm guessing was in her 80's, in a fur coat and hat, standing in her back yard, talking to herself in (I'm going to say...) Greek. This caught the attention of the dog next store whose barking caught the attention of a young man, in jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt, with "cupping" bruises on his right shoulder, who came out of his garage and asked what was going on. Dianne was busy, so I explained who we were and what we were doing. He clearly could not have cared less, said goodbye and turned his back. Dianne did about as well with the old woman. 

At the end of every canvas run, Dianne asks me which was my favourite encounter. This was it.

Thanks for reading!

Have great week!

Karen