Today was another spacious day, a succession of summery, light, unproductive activities that one could do only on a summer weekend. Walking through buzzing Chinatown, thick with the smells of frying fish and sounds of a very good street violin performance. Sipping iced matcha smoothie with sweet tapioca bubbles. Visiting my backyard wild strawberry patch – astonished and grateful for its abundance. While my garden strawberry varieties are struggling with lack of sun and too much attention from our wild neighbours, their wild sisters are slowly conquering the garden. Their only competition are goldenrods that now grow tall and in dense. Most of the season they look like weeds and my garden, quite honestly, looks half-abandoned, but I can’t bring myself to “weeding out” the goldenrods, nor the chamomiles, nor the wild roses. Then, after everyone has settled for an evening, a walk in the forest. I went to the Lac du Moulin today – something I haven’t done in a long time. As I was circling the lake, I stopped to listen to an unfamiliar bord song, took out my phone with the Merlin app – and then, right there a miracle happened – a chorus of sounds and calls I have not heard before, coming from the birds I never saw before and didn’t see then. They were all around me, hidden in the foliage: black-throated green warbler, scarlet tanager, eastern wood pewee, american redstart, brown creeper, blackburbian warbler and my old acquaintances, red-eyed vireos and black-capped chikadees. Ever since I started listening to the birds, sounds excite me. I hear now the calls of the tree frogs, the buzz of insects, the angry cries of two rambuctious baby-racoons chasing each other up the tree, while their mother is surveying something in the direction of the lake. I am hearing the whisper of the leaves. I have just learned that there is a word in Anishinabeemowin (a verb, to be sure) that means “the leaves make a pleasant sound in the wind” – minwewebagaasin. I also say a chipmunk, two juvenile deer and a giant millipede.