The Pigeon Who Flew North
Chapter 10
Every October, the ducks fly south over Lake Ontario, right past my window. Big noisy crowds of them, like the sky decided to move house and didn’t bother telling anyone.
And every October, my pigeons watch them go.
The whole building is wrapped in pigeons — not doves, pigeons, let’s get that straight, I don’t do doves, doves are just pigeons with better PR — and they sit on the ledges and the railings and they just… stay. Like they know something the ducks don’t.
I was sitting there this morning with my coffee, nineteen floors up, watching the sky move house, and I thought: how do they know? How does a bird know who it belongs to, where it belongs to? And why doesn’t one pigeon — just one — ever look at those ducks and say, screw it, I’m coming with you, just to see what happens?
Then I thought: maybe one did.
Maybe she didn’t fly south, though. Maybe she flew north.
No flock. No map. No winter plan. Just a question burning a hole through her feathers: what if home isn’t the place I left — what if it’s the place I haven’t found yet?
She left a city that never slept and never let her sleep either. She crossed an ocean to a city of old stone and rain, learned a whole new language in three months just to order bread correctly — priorities — then another city, all grey light and artists arguing in cafés. Then she went west, to a green place that rained sideways, where she worked for a man who sold cigarettes and certainty in equal measure.
And then — north. Further north than sense. To a city on a lake so big it pretends to be a sea, to the nineteenth floor of a small building, where the winters bite and the summers apologize.
No flock the whole way. Every feather earned.
The ducks fly south because the cold tells them to. That’s instinct — ancient, loud, impossible to argue with. The pigeons stay because something quieter tells them to. Home isn’t always the warm place. Sometimes home is the place you chose when choosing was the hardest thing you’d ever done.
People ask me why I stayed in Toronto. The winters, they say, as if I hadn’t noticed. As if I came here for the weather.
I stayed because the pigeon in me looked at the whole sky moving south and said: no. Not this time. This time I fly toward the thing I’m building, not away from the thing that hurt me.
There’s a difference. The ducks are running from winter. The pigeon flew toward spring — she just had to build it first.
So every October I watch the sky move house, and every October my pigeons watch with me, and I think: maybe the pigeons know something the ducks don’t.
Or maybe — and this is my favorite version — some pigeon did follow the ducks south once, a long time ago. Got all the way there. Looked around at the warm and the easy and the everyone-else.
And turned around. Because home was the thing worth flying toward.
The pigeon’s kingdom is purple. Obviously. 💜
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