During winter break, I walked countless magical streets of snow back home in Hamilton.
Phin’s Coffee, which is interesting and warm and ivy-covered on the inside, is located in a very peculiar place on King Street West. It’s almost hidden in a whitewashed building just beside a narrow alley, but they’ll give you your coffee in a white cup with a pink lid and with a little hand doing a cool sign. A little walk from there, Mikel’s Coffee is right across from Second Cup and blends into the little family of coffee shops and bars that compose the heart of Westdale Village. The roads there are beautiful and tranquil, and if you follow the way the wind blows the snow it leads you toward the livelier, more open section of Westdale South. Beyond the red brick of the little Tim Hortons is the familiar blue glass of the Hamilton Public Library. In a stone tiled square is Weil’s Bakery with a happy little bee sign. Then there’s the avenue of quaint flower shops and Walker’s Chocolates. Lampposts stand on each corner with flyers for open mic nights tacked up all over them. On the black wire fence on which lilacs bloom in spring, snowflakes slept today.
Hamilton, Ontario is a port city, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. You’ll see more old-fashioned mailboxes and bicycle racks and brick buildings than docks—at least in the area I grew up in. Lampposts and benches, too, to make one sentimental. People here make the most of the lampposts, so if they stick flyers and advertisements in the middle, they have little banners stuck on the top section, near the light, that say “Drink West, Go West” which I believe is meant to encourage people to consider Westdale as a world in itself. It’s kind of funny, but I guess it works if you get to know this village. Even neon traffic cones will say “Westdale Village.” Oh, and wrapped around the base section of lampposts are fairy lights.
The drive from Hamilton to Toronto is always interesting. The landscape outside shifts slowly into the towering buildings of Canada’s largest city, then as you drive back, it dwindles again into snowy bushes and hills. Our family made the trip one morning, sometime during the final few days of waning 2021, and December melted the skyline into pink golden feathers that brushed over the frozen lake. Canadian geese—confused, migrating creatures, lost and bewildered like I tend to be in intersections, although theirs was aerial—flew through the sky that arched high. I took a photo with my phone through the fog-softened window and the image I captured is just a zoomed-in blur of black bushes whose growth is untrammeled, spreading like roots into the rosy winter air. Through the great bridge skimming over the icy expanse of Lake Ontario, our Mazda 5 drove, and inside it, I wrote cursive on the window from the inside with my fingernail.
My brother played music and the pumping bass lifted us into euphoria, the lightness of being carried by wheels that felt like the fastest wings in the world through a white-swirling highway of a Canadian December until the twinkling lights of Westdale Village, leftover from Christmas, welcomed us back to our city.
I guess you never learn to see how beautiful your city is until you’ve left it and then returned with the eyes of a stranger.
