Jay and I headed uptown this morning for a routine visit to the Walmart at Royal City Centre, mainly picking up odds and ends and getting our prescriptions sorted so we have enough medicine to see us through the winter travels. With the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend behind us, the holiday quiet had dissolved and the town was visibly back at work. Yet beneath the usual errands and post-holiday bustle, there was an unmistakable shift in the air, something that felt distinctly different.
For the better part of a week, the Lower Mainland has basked beneath an unbroken dome of deep cobalt. Day after day arrived without so much as a stray wisp of cloud drifting off the Strait of Georgia. The light was sharp, the air pleasantly dry, and the usual damp chill seemed entirely forgotten. In such moments, the human mind engages in its favourite parlour trick, quietly convincing itself that the anomaly has become the permanent order of things. One steps out onto the balcony, takes in the sunshine, and begins to operate under the collective delusion that autumn has simply been cancelled this year.
It never lasts, of course.
This morning, reality resumed its scheduled broadcast. The sky outside is a flat, uncompromising wool blanket, and the temperature has settled into that familiar, damp bite. It is completely ordinary for October. In fact, anything else is outright fiction. Yet, looking out across the rooftops, one cannot help feeling an unreasonable twinge of mild betrayal, as if the atmosphere had broken an unspoken promise. We build an entire philosophy of permanence out of five consecutive sunny days, only to act shocked when the rain decides to punch the clock on time.