Black crows fly above me in the sky. They fly like the wind on a whisper less winter day. They fly in the stream lights of sun, the crisp chill that makes people like chimneys, taking the heat of our internal being and freezing it into steam.
I recall Vancouver at this time, when flimsy white metal iron fences were too cold to touch; when I could see the ***** of frozen water on them, little ice drops. I remember that old Chinese lady, unusual to be a chain smoker but none the less. Outside in her plastic sandals from an Asian dollar store and her hands rubbing briskly as she smoked away. She was older, white haired even. She had some Chinese dolls, golden cats adorning the sides of her door and cement lions greeting faces at her gate. Her house a “Vancouver special” with red shingled roofs and a flimsy little yard. The chilly morning smog of the city nestled in corners, lingered over sleepy buildings, settled into back doors of coffee shops or swept in a dance with a broom over the awakening shops doormats. Most ladies of the area gardened in their yards or I would catch them sweeping the water off of their back decks but she just sat all day, nothing more to do, just sat, smoking.
The Asian community in Vancouver is vast and big. Chinatown was a mystery to me when I was little. The dragons and fortune cookies, the rows of heads sloping down the hill into the city, the streetlights designed like black gum droplets, gazing at the passer-by’s. My little head opened wide as I held my father’s hand and got lost within the dizzying crowd of fantastic colour and pungent smells like fish or other scents of unknown origin. The unfamiliar language spitting off the tongues of faces I didn’t know. And finally the descent, the bus ride back, the warmth from the heater, warming my little hands that wrapped around a lychee fruit juice box and that golden sun gleaming through the city bus window and strutting on the sidewalks. I would watch the artsy people pass by on the streets, Mohawks, colours, art galleries, and also sophisticated gentlemen in suits or business woman in blazers and heels. Gazing out and seeing each person. Each house each building. Each human, living life so differently yet how similar they all were, we all are. I wonder if I was I just a crescent, a slip in the corners of these people’s eyes. Or perhaps they too recall a similar scene, and in that image within their minds there walks a little girl, ample with curiosity, lost in the wonder.
The crows laugh on electric lines, a time has passed and light drizzles begin to wash over, fogging lines of car windows, drizzling and spraying. The school bus home kind of rain, the one that stains cement and makes sing-song sounds as it drips down the gutters and drainpipes. The rain that makes the colour red pop out, the one that shivers hands and rests on pink cheeks. The crows laugh at my dreaming, as I sit in some old neighborhood leaning on a dumpy alleyways wooden garage door, stuck in some memory. Or rather they laugh because some woman is standing alone in the rain, getting drenched by nature’s eternal bath.