Gray days

On Friday the skies over Vancouver darkened, as if we were all in a movie theater and the movie was about to start. But the movie never started -- the previews never even showed up -- the lights remained dimmed, and the skies were blanketed gray the whole weekend.

For a few minutes, sunlight broke through the pall and limned the edges of clouds above and fence slats and building faces below. But as soon as the sight could be appreciated, the sun retreated, as if she were a beauty who shied away from the very attention she drew, and Vancouver returned to its natural state. Skies the color of mud.

I'd planned on going on a long bike ride or two, to see the city or even the ocean, but those ambitions faded whenever rain plinked my window and I thought of rain down the legs of my pants and mist on my glasses. I spent most of the weekend skulking on my haunches.

I live in the quietest of neighborhoods in Vancouver. As guidebooks are quick to point out, everything south of Broadway is residential and too quiet for its own good. On maps cartographers are wont to lay insets -- enlargements of the downtown area -- over the neighborhood where I live. They know there's not much to miss here, unless you haven't seen one-story houses lined up in rows.

And so I wait. The winter solstice having passed, I know longer, more pleasant days are ahead, when we in the northern latitudes trade 20-hour nights for 20-hour days and get back the bottle deposit we paid when we bought this six-pack of winter ail. I'll count the minutes the days lengthen: one or two minutes here and there, an hour each month. I'll wait for sunnier days.