POEM: TRANSFORMATION IN SUNNIDALE PARK

Transformation

In Sunnidale Park

(11 November)

In the warmth of a day,

before ice crusts

the yellow,

fallen leaves,

when breezes

tease strands

of yellow grasses,

a brook impatiently gurgles,

while raindrops

dot its stiller waters

with perfect pinprick circles.

It’s only then

that the wood,

the path,

the newly-planked footbridge

will be remembered.

I WROTE THIS A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO, SOME TIME BEFORE REMEMBRANCE DAY. I was walking in Sunnidale Park, which decades ago had been a golf course, and where you still see evidence of former sand traps and greens. Now it’s mostly a long, grassy expanse that banks onto woods through which runs a stream meandering its way to the lake a half mile away. Where it ends at a major roadway, at the park’s western edge, there are paths through stands of trees, conveniently labelled by the local horticultural society. The paths lead to woods at the south side of the park, and entering it I always have a sense of stepping into another time and place. Here, are older stands of trees eventually bottom out at the stream whose course, for the most part, has been tamed by concrete abutments and channels.

     At the bottom of the woods you look up into the canopy and forget where you are. You feel small beside these great wooden giants, like a child looking around an adult world. The floor of the wood is covered with fallen branches and leaves, and the air is rich and restorative. You can breathe down here. It is cool, and the word "immaculate" comes to mind, as do words from a  song* : “Out here, we is stoned; immaculate!” Under the trees' high, protecting canopy, you do feel clean, purer for just being there.

     It would be nice if the rest of the park were like the woods; it’s too much like a golf course for my taste. Families gather there during the summer months for picnics and celebrations. Wedding parties take photographs in the arboretum; children play on swings; other groups play soccer or softball. But all that open space! In a growing city like ours, its prime real estate, near downtown, and ripe for a mall or two. Maybe.  Or maybe in fifty or a hundred years it will be covered with trees again like the woods beside it. Time always has a way of telling us, even if we never listen.

     Such thoughts intrude, even when you are in a sacred space And this woods is one. Now you walk amid trees, some so wide that three people couldn’t link arms around. Now you step over fallen limbs and branches, listening to birds and insects, and furtive sounds of the cautious, burrowing creatures as they all go about their lives, all of them aware of you as nothing more than just another part of their world. Your footsteps are nearly silent; the generations of decomposing leaves make a soft carpet for your feet. And you walk and walk among the colours and smells, the sights and sounds of this wood world until you see the branches begin to thin near the path's end. And you reluctantly emerge  back into the park.

     But you've taken a slightly different way than the one you usually take, and you come out on the other side of the small stream that flows down to the lake. There's a footbridge and you walk over it. It's newly-planked and sturdy with its steel frame. The metal has only the slightest bit of rust on some of the round bolt heads. Your feet sound like drums or distant thunder, and you stop and wait for the sound of boot steps coming behind you, but today there are only yours to mark this place. 
     You move on. The air is crisp and you’ve heard there might be frost tonight; the season’s first snows will come in the weeks ahead.

You look back over the bridge, your eyes following the stream as it disappears into the woods. You continue your walk through the park, trying to keep in mind all you have forgotten to remember.

     The photograph is of my mother, presumably taken by my father sometime in the early 1950s, I'd guess. While the poem does have its emphasis on Remembrance Day, WWI, and remembering that first, great horror of the modern age (though there were—and are—more to come), I think memory in general an important theme. For some reason, I had a caption of "Dipping into Streams" attached with her photograph on my computer, and the thought comes to mind about how you can never 'dip' into the same stream twice; it's never the same stream from one moment to the next. And so, I think it’s important we remember those 'old' streams, even as we dip into the new, otherwise we just live in the 'now' of things, never really knowing 'when'. 
     (As an aside, when I was typing this section about my mother, some of my keyboard began to default to its French language setting; my word processing software has a glitch in it, and this happens from time to time, and the only way I can correct it is by rebooting my computer. My mother was Franco-Ontarian, born in a small, French-speaking town along the Ottawa River, so I wonder if her spirit isn’t trying to tell me something. I don't know, but periodically, like everybody else, I have these events of synchrony, like when you are thinking a word and you hear it on the radio at the same time. That kind of thing. This feels like one of those moments. Dipping into streams or rebooting my computer—it's never the same thing twice! Yeah! That's it! Or...I don't know. But it's good to remember things, anyway, and with no one to remember this moment of serendipity with, Dear Reader, I shall gladly share it with you!)
  
Cheers, Jake. 


     * From The Doors' album, L.A. Woman, with Jim Morrison vocals: “The Wasp: Texas Radio and the Big Beat”. Not sure what he means by being "stoned immaculate",  but hey man , it’s The Doors. Do I need to say more?