Springifying

We coyotes are a nocturnal bunch. Comes with the genetic territory. When we're not howlin' at moons, we like runnin' under 'em. And it so happens that on my nocturnal perambulations, I've been seeing signs of spring returning to the centre of the city. Others note the seasonal birds chirping in the mornings. Bah. The little buggers wake me up, no matter how cheerful they sound. What I'm talkin' about is clean sidewalks and gutters.

As the city sleeps, the hired help is out sweeping sidewalks with pushbrooms and pressure-hosing them off, a winter's grim grime swept down the catchbasins in a single night.

As a four-legged type who eschews, (but sometimes, uh, chews) shoes, I appreciate this greatly. It means far fewer soggy cigarette butts squishing between my toes. Always a plus, in my books.

I also like the relative silence of this cleaning work. The plows that rush into the middle of the night after winter snowfalls are noisy damn things, given to loud, irritating roars and odd scraping and crashing noises that are hardly conducive to good napping.

Hand-held pushbrooms and water hoses beneath an early morning moon, on the other hand seem tolerably organic. After midnight, a city sounds quite different. The people who clean the streets during that time seem to respect this, and match quieter rhythms. The hum of traffic remains, but is greatly muted, and one can hear smaller sounds that rarely stand out after daylight. Like, say, the toenails of rather undomesticated dog types, splashing in puddles and romping on newly clean concrete...

Listen, and you can hear 'em...

Image: David Woodward, Cardiff University School of Physics and Astronomy