by Tina Wayland
In late winter we walked through a neighbourhood in lockdown, my daughter and me, her 10-year-old hand in mine. In those early days a tendril of fear ran through everything, grew wild and sudden and unexpected like weeds in the thinnest, most impossible of cracks. We walked, scarves pulled up like masks, avoiding people, pacing up and down the same streets, over and over. Caught in a loop.
This tree, that park, those stairs.
It was sometime in mid-March, snow still on the ground, when we found our way behind the rows of the neighbourhood’s three-storey homes, those red- and yellow-brick houses with their winding, black-iron staircases. The Montreal of postcards. We stepped from the quiet of the street into somewhere else entirely—an alley, hidden, running the length of the block, covered in fresh snow.
Safe.
And filled with signs of life.
My daughter stepped forward and broke the crust with her boot, then reached for me to follow. We ducked, avoiding the grey branches of leafless trees hanging low into the alley, heavy, scattering snow as we passed. There were wood planks to peek through, wire fences, the backs of old storage sheds built flush against the alley, dirty windows revealing summer storage. I pointed out snow-covered deck chairs and mounds of wintering gardens and Christmas lights left up, months later, casting colour and light into the gloom.
As we slipped past houses the occupants would look up from tables and sinks full of dishes, watch us walk past as they stood in doorways smoking cigarettes, sipping coffee, housecoats billowing in the winter air. It was like walking in on some secret, shared between alley neighbours, no one saying a thing.
Once, my daughter handed me her gloves and we walked with palms stuck together in the late-March thaw. At her insistence we began to explore more of these places, finding our way in between row houses, learning how to access the back of every block. She began to venture out ahead, showing me alley treasures that had started to peek out from the snow: an empty insect house awaiting its spring tenants, a blue plastic rain barrel, a painted sign pointing the way to Paris and London and Miami.
Some days we’d walk further to find new alleys, leaving the confines of our own streets for the uncertainty and distraction of something—anything—different. Other days we retraced our steps closer to home. It became our ritual, a way to break up identical days, to keep the fear away, to hold my daughter close. We didn’t need to restrict ourselves to sidewalks or step out of a stranger’s path. Instead, there was freedom of space, of movement, a way to pass by someone on either side of the alley, with plenty of room between. There were no cars to watch for, no delivery trucks to maneuver around. It was a path meant only for people, and it was mostly just the two of us.
Days and weeks passed and yards began to emerge from hibernation, soil soaked in winter runoff, water puddling between the rows. When the sun was out the neighbours opened their windows a crack, filling the air with music and conversation and a trail of arguments, bits of life escaping from confinement. My daughter put her finger to her lips, listening, as some song I’d never heard escaped from an upstairs window. She walked down the path ahead of me, singing all the words.
On our walks we discovered a ruelle verte, marked with a rusty blue-and-green sign—a communal space tended by neighbours, filled with box planters and benches and walls of vines that had just begun to bud. Even in the pre-spring mud with the branches still so bare we could see these were different; we knew—in just weeks—they were going to be special. I felt a wave of anticipation and sadness for all that was about to change.
Almost overnight the weather warmed, rousing magnolia flowers that filled the bare trees with thick petals of pink and white before they fell and covered the ground like a carpet, making way for their leaves. Next came the tips of tulips growing long and green until they finally opened to reveal their colours. It became a game to guess which ones would emerge red or white or yellow, finding our way back down the alley to see who was right. Sometimes we’d be surprised with an orange tulip, or one with pointed petals, or a row of tulips so purple they were almost black, set against a wall of old bricks. Everything blooming, everything crumbling.
Soon we switched our boots for shoes and balanced our way across puddles and along fences, my daughter’s spring coat suddenly too short, shoes too tight. I reached out to catch myself and she grabbed my arm with a hand that was so much bigger than I remembered. How had I missed this—this hand I’d held every day, this child whose head was now as high as my shoulders, legs sprouting out from pants two sizes too small?
I placed a palm on the top of her head—hatless, hot from the spring sun—to get a feel for her height. To pause, to stop this moment. But she reached her hand up, pushed her fingers through the cracks of mine. Incapable of standing still.
Back doors began to open, spilling new sounds into the alleyways—music, voices, the clanging of dishes and rattling of patio furniture pulled outdoors. The air filled with the smells of spring cleaning, lemon and pine and bleach. Now neighbours leaned against railings, lazily dangling cigarettes in the late afternoon sun, ashes falling and drifting in the warm spring wind.
We knew each back path by heart now, my daughter and me. Knew every inch of every alley. Yet everything around us was changing. The trees began to grow their leaves, in moments when we weren’t looking, turning bare branches into thick canopies that hung over our heads. The grey tentacles of wild vines that crisscrossed fences and walls were now a canvas of green with the brightest bursts of flowers, here pink, there white with flecks of blue. Dirt plots were turned and fertilized with fistfuls of compost and manure and crushed bone, a scent that clung to our noses and turned our stomachs.
In what felt like only days the gardens began to grow, and we peeked through metal fences and between slats for a glimpse at the life pushing up from the soil. These were not the ample lawns of the suburbs, with gardens neatly planted in one corner of pruned grass. These were yards in one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods, built on land that was uneven and shifting, pierced with the roots of century-old trees that lifted and cracked everything in their path. Here gardens grew where they could—in plots pushed up against the fence where the light got in, in bright plastic buckets, old crates, clawfoot tubs that once washed families of eight or nine or ten children in a row.
We wondered how many had planted their gardens here before, generation after generation, each layer growing and maturing and dying to feed the ones that came next. Wondered who had been here before there were even gardens to tend. My daughter said these had probably been around since I was born, and I answered they’d been here much longer, our perceptions separated by an undergrowth of time.
As the days grew warm and long there was new life everywhere we looked. Box gardens were filled with neat rows of romaine and arugula. Pots on stoops and back stairs held tomato plants that threatened to drop ripe fruit against the trestles that held them in place. Squirrels gathered raspberries that climbed up thorny vines, tucking them into their cheeks, oblivious to the shiny metal plates planted on sticks to chase them away.
And everywhere, everywhere the ivy grew and curled around everything, its green-and-white leaves fitting into even the smallest of spaces, clinging to fences knee-high, then eye level, finally reaching the top and breaking free to the other side. Once, I twisted a stray strand around my fist, tugged, trying to pull it, wield it to my will, then tucking it back into the yard it had come from. But the next day it had escaped, untameable, into the alley.
Then spring became summer, and we walked the alleys in our bare legs, scraping against spiky milkweed pods and lily leaves, kicking pinecones with our feet. Sometimes my daughter would stop to lean on me and empty the rocks from her shoes, balancing on one foot as I reached out to steady her. Her fingers on my shoulder were so much bigger now, long and lean, nails no longer caked in the dirt that once seemed to never wash off, now tended to in her own private moments.
Now back yards sprouted elderly men in wide-brimmed hats, lazy grey-bearded dogs, children in paddle pools. Neighbours typed on laptops in the sunshine, talked over fences. Everywhere we looked there was life, growing between cracks and around buildings, reaching up into trees and around telephone poles that had been planted here decades ago. We kicked up clouds as we walked, remnants of dirt and old brick dust that settled over everything, pieces of the past unearthed until the rain washed it all away again.
One day a familiar path we’d walked many times before had changed, overnight. A layer of green grass now covered the alley, fresh cut and even, the scent of it heavy, almost overwhelming in the air. Someone had laid stones down the middle, and we stepped from one to the next, each spaced perfectly for even the smallest of feet. There were old crates filled with newly planted flowers, herbs, and cucumbers, their yellow blossoms a promise of new growth to come. Plastic chairs in every colour had been set at each side, with tree stumps for tables covered in coffee cup rings and chipped saucers filled with ash. This was a country scene in the heart of the city, our alley oasis, grown out of the snow and the mud of the seasons into this landscape that reshaped the concrete foundations, taking up room, finding a life of its own. In our months of walking together, of escaping the confinement and weeding out the fear, exploring the spaces behind the scenes, these alleys had grown on us. Around us.
I reached for my daughter’s hand, but she’d already moved away.
Tina Wayland is completing her Creative Writing MA at Concordia University, where she won the department’s 2021 McKeen Award for “Where the Light Gets In.” She’s been published in such places as carte blanche and Open Door Magazine. Tina’s story “The Tending of Small Gardens” made the 2021 CBC Non-Fiction Prize longlist and “Foxholes” was shortlisted in Room Magazine’s 2022 Short Forms Contest.
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