FROM DECEMBER 2023 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

North and south of where I live in Bloordale, there are towering cranes and cement trucks, the protective canopy of scaffolding over a sidewalk, debris screens. I see the cranes at night, their booms lit by the moon, the tremendous blocks of suspended concrete acting as a counterweight. An endless stream of tandem dump trucks carry excavated dirt north on Dufferin. Sewers are dug up, electronic devices fished through drainpipes. Tiebacks, rakers and struts are pounded into the earth. A city is constantly in upheaval and having to be maintained.

I once saw a pair of sneakers I liked in a store window, but by the time I returned the building had been knocked down. I left a coat at a hotel gala coat check, but when I finally found the claim stub, the hotel had been levelled.

It’s this sort of impermanence with big things that rattles my equilibrium.

I find it jarring when, walking down Bloor, my foot steps on what I thought was a solid sidewalk but turns out to be a hollow concrete panel next to a young tree in an iron fence. When the concrete panel tips with a thunk, you realize a city’s infrastructure is a built carapace over the natural world.

I was leaning up against the boards of an outdoor hockey rink last fall, watching my son skate, and noticed a support stud at my feet was rotting. It was then I realized everything built is like this. The manufactured world is at its strongest the second after it is completed, whereas the trees and gardens around the rink have a restorative power. They possess their own life force fuelled by sun and water and soil.

This feeling rose in me again while watching the dome my son plays soccer in getting inflated at Central Tech – the immense machinery required for even this simple temporary structure. And yet, around the dome, trees were turning colour. The erect brown desiccated stems of black-eyed Susans clenched themselves. The world of gardens was busy draining itself to produce a battery of life underground for the winter. And I liked the notion of storage, of gathering strength, of creating seed independent of any effort I make. My son realized and accepted that I would miss half his game because I’d wandered into the muddy grass to watch a tree do its work.

I collect seeds through the fall and winter. Often, the seeds arrive when the leaves are gone, so I’m at a loss to know what the tree or flower is. I just snap off the stem if I like the seed envelope. A burgundy crescent of flat seeds sat in the cold porch over winter, and then in spring I planted the seeds and the first unfurling leaf turned out to be an eastern redbud.

I was so delighted with my talent – I felt like a creator of life. Things made of wood, like fences, were dying all around me. Whereas trees took care of themselves. Okay, there is some pruning. But it’s the difference between replacing a pair of worn-out sneakers and clipping your toenails. The constant rot of lumber, rust of metal, crumble of concrete filled me with gloom, whereas trees provoked curiosity. Birds will sit on a fence or the branches of a tree, they don’t care, but one is busy dying while the other is living.

There’s a large eastern redbud I like to visit on St. Clarens, and I laugh that my puny, three-inch version may turn into something as grand as this. The tree spreads its skinny arms and, in spring, will shock you with its dazzle of pink buds. A promise of a thing like that, nestled in the concrete heart of a city, is what keeps me going.