Work hours have been long of late. I get to work in the dark and leave in the dark and even though the days are beginning to get – by minute degrees – longer, I have not been outside enough to see it.

But then I have my lunch break.  So today I went out to drink my coffee and eat my banana and sat in the only dry area outside my building. And for the first time this year, I smelt the first rush of budding winter honeysuckle. The fact that the air smells of flowers in January was not what brought me to the coast, but it is certainly a large part of what keeps me here.

After work, it was dark and raining. Not terribly hard, but for long enough that the city was soaked and the roads had patches of standing puddle. I had come by car that day (long, boring story) and so had to drive home. Getting out of downtown after work is a bit of a tense dance but once out and moving in the traffic along the edges of the core, one can often go at least two blocks before getting stopped by another light. The final stretch home for me is a long road that runs between older homes set well back from the road and with gardens aggressively healthy. What struck me in those final slow but steady miles was the interplay between the water, the lights and the smells.

I drive with my window open in all weather bar outright hurricanes. Driving along the last straight toward home, the air warm enough to swirl the mix of cedar, winter bloom and the occasional wood fire from someone’s woodstove through my car, the lights from the streetlamps, the homes, the businesses, sparked along the thin sheer of standing water, and broke open in sprays of colour when car tires plundered the still of flat water. Driving was like moving along a gently undulating fold of black satin. It was impossible to discern the lane markings; driving was more a matter of trusting the tail lights of the person in front of you, which surprisingly, was comforting. By the time I got home it was if work had never been.