23 November 2024 – A play on “bright & early,” of course, and a favourite winter-time quip of the host of the CBC early-morning radio show that I listened to for years.

He’d sign off, promising to greet us again the following morning, “Dark and early.”

What came to mind yesterday, as I walked an alley just off East Broadway & Brunswick…

is that, this time of year, “dark & early” describes both ends of the day.

It is exactly 3:53:36 p.m. — not yet 4 p.m.! — and Nomi Chi’s VMF mural (2016, the Festival‘s inaugural year) broods with extra drama in the failing light.

(I know the change is increasingly dramatic, the farther north you go. I do know this. I spent time in Inuvik, one January, and learned that the Arctic is not only the Land of the Midnight Sun, it is also the Land of the Mid-day Moon. But… now I am here, and here I am now, and this is what I notice, in my here-and-now.)