The dog days of mid to late April

We're a funny people, us Canadians.

It's been warm in Toronto for maybe a week or so, solid. Summer weather, after what many people have termed a winter from hell. (Does that hell has frozen over? If that's the case, I got lots and lots of sex coming my way!)

People are still complaining about the winter weather. People have been loving the warm weather. And then yesterday, it happened. I knew it would, but when it did, it came as a surprise.

During the winter my gal and I hadn't gone out on too many evening strolls. So now that spring is here, we've been trying to get out from behind our desks and outside. So yesterday, around 6ish, when the sun was starting to go down, we were out on the Danforth, waiting at a light to cross the street, when this guy steps up beside us.

He was panting heavily. His thick, round sun glasses were resting on his chin, for what reason I don't know. His thin grey shirt was covered with splotches of sweat, and he carried a much too heavy backpack over his shoulder. He came right up to us, and without preamble or or the slightest level of prompting, said, "It's too hot."

I looked at him in surprise. Huh? He looked at me, and perhaps sensing that I wasn't on the same page as him, said, "When you can't stop seating, it's way too hot." I have recently realized most people appreciate an attempt to understand their point of view, so I started a half hearted lie. "Yeah, I guess it..." and that's as far as I could get. I could not join this squat guy's moral outrage.

The light changed and he crossed the street ahead of us, obviously he had somewhere to be and he'd been going there for some time, in the blazing, mid April setting sun.

And that was it. The first person I heard complain about the warmth.

It didn't even take a month to go from voicing displeasure at the cold to assuring complete strangers that the Earth, shifting on its axis and adjusting the exposure of the northern hemisphere to the sun, was asking too much of us.

I gotta tell you - no one complains like a Canuck.

We should have that as a motto. I wonder how it reads in Latin?