18 March 2024 – I’m in Stanley Park, along with half of all Vancouver it seems, ready to enjoy this weekend burst of double-digit sunshine.

More precisely, I’m off the bus, through the underpass, and poised at the south-west curve of Lost Lagoon…

about to walk counter-clockwise and follow the trail east along the lagoon’s north shore.

Everything trembles on the edge of spring, unfurling new growth. Trees overhead, trees weeping downward to the water.

And, down there in the water, in the rich muck of the wetland, most wonderfully of all…

the fluorescent glow of the Western Skunk Cabbage. My first of the season. Now I know it’s spring!

The eastern variety is a more modest creature, it seems, so I forgive myself for being entirely ignorant of this plant until I moved west and was smacked in the eye by all that gold. (And also educated by You-Know-Who-You-Are.) Now I look for it each year, and give a little wriggle of joy at the first sighting.

On across Lost Lagoon, and on and on and then, though still in Stanley Park, I’m in entirely another world. I’m in all the noisy facilities-rich hoop-la of Second Beach.

Right where this red button says I am:

I turn right, head up the Seawall toward Third Beach. (Thank you, I murmur to the universe. I am so lucky, to be right here, right now, in all this.)

Here we all are, in all this.

Runners…

and cyclists/loungers/kiddies/adults/impromptu tents/storm-thrown stumps on Third Beach…

and rocks and freighters just off Ferguson Point…

and a tree with a heart…

and a patch of Seawall with its very own Cat-Angel…

and — after I’ve walked myself back south out of Stanley Park and into Morton Park — four Vancouver icons. All on view without turning my head.

Background, the renovated Berkeley Tower with its Douglas Coupland mosaics; mid-ground, Yue Minjun’s Ah-Mazeing-Laughter sculpture installation; right mid-ground, a cluster of Windmill Palms; and, tucked in their foreground shadow, some Canada Geese.

The day has me in sensory overload.

Yet, with all that wealth of input, one image keeps coming back to mind.

The north shore wetland of Lost Lagoon, the dabbling duck above the mossy rock on the left, the Skunk Cabbage on the right, and all that tender new greenery shooting up everywhere in-between.

Spring.