It was supposed to be the dead of the winter. Well, maybe not the dead of it, but the time when sunny days follow vicious blizzards. It took me long enough to get used to the idea that March is a winter month. Now, I don’t know what to think anymore.

Clearview boulevard stretches in an almost straight line from the entrance to the city to the edge of the forest. The edge of the forest is a large clearing with very old apple trees that no one tends to anymore. In the late summer, does come here to feast on apples. Some evenings there are as many as a dozen. They lift their heads and watch me, the intruder, with wary eyes. Sometimes they let me pass without a movement. Sometimes I step on a stick of make a brusque movement and they take off into the forest.

I think that the Clearview boulevard is the best street in the world, because it leads to the forest. It is a busy street, probably the busiest in our town. It proudly hosts our town’s tiny concert hall, a gas station, a half a dozen bus stops, a Tim Horton’s, a local shopping centre, an ice arena, a high school of incredible ugliness and right behind a private condo complex – the closest thing our town has to a gated community. The condos boast a view of sunsets over a water reservoir) to which they have an exclusive access. I tend to think of them as class enemies, but I still love their view.

Past the condo complex the street becomes quaint and quiet. One can be almost sure that everyone walking either goes to the forest, or comes from it. Then, without warning, the town ends and the forest begins.

I almost gave up on my walk, except I couldn’t. The melting of snow, at least a month too early, and recent rains made the paths almost impracticable.

The mud slowed down my pace and transformed my walk into something unexpected. It was almost like interacting with another form of life: the mud was slick and slippery in some places, sticky and gooey in others. It yielded under my weight and made me yield in return, as I slowed down, looking for footing. In some places, it was possible to walk on the leaves carpet along the path – it felt like stepping on a trampoline.

I often choose to walk in the arboreum, because there is hardly ever anyone else there. I try to memorize the names of the trees and tell them apart – it doesn’t come easy to me, especially when the trees are naked. There is Elm, Butternut Hickory, Black and Sugar Maple, Black Cherry, Red Cedar and White Eastern Cedar. Then there is this White Pine that looks like arboreum’s matriarch to me.

I my native language, forest is masculine and tree is neutral (neither masculine nor feminine), so I grew up thinking of forests in masculine terms. Recently, I realized that metaphorically (if not biologically), the trees are much closer to the feminine. Thus transformed my view of the forest. Now I see the community of mothers, aunts and grandmothers. Now I feel safe and confident in their company.

I haven’t decided yet through which linguistic lens I see the mushrooms (also masculine in Ukrainian). Even in the very early days of march, mushrooms are present and thriving, assuring me that life goes on.

And so do the mosses. I keep walking thinking that I am probably a one-percenter. After all, how many people outside our town live in a walking distance to a forest?

I may be wrong, but I don’t remember a pond at this particular place. I think it’s just an accumulation of snow and ice and water that creates a temporary illusion of a pond. Somewhere else in the forest there is an actual lake that isn’t one. It got overrun with algae and plants and is now slowly turning into a meadow. Here is a hollow that temporarily became a pond. I love how the forest constantly reinvents itself.

I took a different way back home. It is a bike line along a large water reservoir (the same that brightens the view of the gated community). It used to run along the backyards on one side and a wild growth: birches, sumac bushes, asters, milkweed, young maple and ash trees on the other. Now part of this wild growth has been destroyed and some developer is building luxury townhouses, another gated community with a view on sunset.