Great. Outdoors

Taking the smooth with the rough

“I like the bloody spring. It means I’ve made it through another year”

~ Leslie Thomas, “Arrivals and Departures”

UP UNTIL NOW, it hasn’t been much of a spring.

Disappointing, dispiriting, more like an extended winter with occasional benefits – times when it was cool and damp rather than cold and wet.

Finally, just three weeks shy of summer, it’s feeling more like the season we were hoping for. To prove it, greatly daring, I went out yesterday without a coat. Sure enough, it was a perfect T-shirt day.

Okay, it hasn’t been all bad.

We’ve had a couple of false starts, when we’ve managed a quick coffee and a snack here and there on lesser patios under a milk-and-watery sun.

But the one that counts is our Friday night dinner place, with rosé to drink, as the gods of incipient summer intended.

(Plus, as a bonus apertif, a designer cocktail — a chocolate-chip-cookie-dough Old Fashioned, created by one of the servers who’s heavily into mixology. And waistcoats.)

This was their first patio evening and we were the first — but far from the last — to sit down.

Streetcars at one elbow hissing by like big red submarines and, on the sidewalk side, passersby in full conversational flow, some on their earbuds, some off their meds.

I’m pretty sure the guy dragging a suitcase behind him and yelling, “F***ing goof! F***ing goof!” wasn’t on a conference call.

Or perhaps he was talking to the White House.

Not everyone’s cup of cheese-foam latte (see Thursday, “C-C-C”) perhaps, but it adds a certain inner-city je ne sais quoi.

Towards the tail-end of Covid when outdoor dining regulations were being slackened off a bit, we’d happily sit in the open air wearing parkas and listening to musicians, also forced to play outside and muffled up against the chill.

That’s when the city started its street-patio program, to get people back to spending money at restaurants and bars that were starved for revenue.

It took on such importance. Just to be somewhere that wasn’t home, with amiable strangers around us, albeit a prudent two metres apart.

But that was then and this is now. The old imperative is no longer in place.

Time was when I was an enthusiastic backpacker, happily schlepping off into the back-of-beyond bush for days on end.

Discomfort was a part of the deal.

Out of cell-phone range, sleeping on the ground, shrugging off the rain, and utilizing the most rudimentary of sanitary engineering. Completely open to whatever the elements might be throwing down.

Giving the local inhabitants as wide a berth as prudent.

Rewarded with vistas the day-hikers never get to see, and a genuine feeling of achievement at the end of the trail.

But that was then and this now.

I can’t handle the terrain even of a day-hike now. The arthritic knee has seen to that.

Discomfort? Not so much, anymore.

I’ve turned into a sidewalk rambler. Which is fine. I can still cover some distance. I’ve walked around cities all over the world.

Nice to be able to stop for a decent beverage when you need one — Paris is always reliable — rather than lake water pumped through a filter that you hope will work, wilderness and dysentery not being words that go well together.

Especially now that spring has belatedly sprung and the air is open for business.

LATE-BREAKING REALITY CHECK

Idylls are such fleeting things.

Came the dawn (not that I saw it) and, this being southern Ontario, the weather has reverted to what it obviously believes to be its natural state.

You could be on a patio today, but you’d be drinking hot chocolate rather than a designer cocktail and rosé.

Ah well. This too shall pass.

We tell ourselves.

We’re forever telling ourselves.

We get so tired of telling ourselves.