The Only Pleasure in the Room

Walk with me.On the Way to the RoomIt is late autumn, or perhaps early winter — I don’t remember taking these lessons in summer, and memory, as we shall see, has its own ideas about the seasons. We are in Mississauga, not far from the lake, turning off Hiawatha onto Cumberland. The street is dark, though it is only late afternoon, because the trees here are old, and enormous, and were never asked to make way for anything. The houses are small Victorians set back on large lots, modest, the sort of houses that have been lived in rather than displayed.The leaves crunch underfoot and give up that brown, papery, faintly sweet smell that is the closest thing autumn has to a signature. On the colder days the air smells of pewter. I have never been able to explain that to anyone’s satisfaction, including my own, but anyone who has walked out on a still November morning near Lake Ontario will, I think, know what I mean: a dull, soft, metallic cleanness, as though the cold had scoured…