Lake Ontario shapes the Toronto passages as more than scenery: it is a body of water with a geological past, a landmark beside Yolandi’s home, and a setting for plans of care that remain shadowed by environmental damage. The lake’s changing scale gives the narrative a way to think about grief across time, while its polluted present complicates the hope Yolandi places in living near it.

Shoreline, Deep Time, and Grief

In a postscript to a letter for Elfrieda, Yolandi describes a hill in Toronto that pedestrians climb when going north and descend when going south. She connects the city’s terrain to an earlier landscape: until roughly 13,000 years ago, the shore of Lake Ontario reached much farther inland, close to the level of her third-floor window. The lake was then known as Lake Iroquois; after an ice dam melted, its water drained away and the lake became smaller. What is now a familiar urban setting thus bears the outline of a much larger body of water.

Yolandi follows this history into the present through Davenport, a north Toronto road tracing an Indigenous trail along the ancient shoreline. Her account moves from the physical persistence of that route to a playful speculation about the word davenport, imagining it as a name for a more comfortable place to sit. The shift makes the old shoreline both material history and an opening for imaginative thought: traces of earlier lives remain in the city even when the water itself has receded.

The lake’s changing size leads Yolandi to consider the pace at which continents move, comparing it to the growth of fingernails. She cannot remember whether the continents are drawing closer together or moving apart, but the uncertain direction does not displace her interest in the pace. She sets that immense, nearly imperceptible movement beside grief, which may seem to pass quickly or to last forever. Lake Ontario’s geological history therefore gives her a scale against which sorrow can be considered without pretending that sorrow follows a clear timetable.

A Toronto Setting for Separation and Contact

The lake also anchors the present tense of Yolandi’s Toronto life. While working on her book, she imagines meeting Elfrieda in a Winnipeg café. In that imagined reunion, Elfrieda has chosen a table by the window, placed French library books beside it, and ordered Yolandi a flat white. The imagined scene is intimate and specific, but it is not an actual meeting: the letter returns to Yolandi at home in Toronto, where construction across the street interrupts the quiet. The distance between the city where she lives and the city where Elfrieda is remains central to the passage.

In another moment, Yolandi is walking through a muddy park beside the lake when her mother calls. Yolandi looks at the phone before answering; her mother says that Elfrieda has done it again, and Yolandi squats in the mud to hear what happened. The lake is not presented as the cause or solution to the crisis. Instead, its nearby presence locates the instant when ordinary movement through Toronto gives way to urgent family news. The contrast between the park-side walk and the call’s abrupt announcement makes the lake a quiet marker of the life continuing around the family’s recurring emergency.

The Lake as a Possible Place of Care

When Yolandi thinks about where Elfrieda might go after leaving the hospital, she proposes that Elfrieda stay with her in Toronto for a while. She offers a different setting, a household where Yolandi would be home often and Nora would also spend time, and suggests renting a piano if Elfrieda wanted to play. The offer is framed as an experiment without pressure, not as a guarantee that a change of place will resolve Elfrieda’s distress.

Yolandi’s idea of getting a boat extends that proposal toward Lake Ontario. When her mother asks about the boat, Yolandi explains that she lives beside the lake and imagines a small rowboat that they could take out if they wanted. The suggestion is modest and conditional: it offers the possibility of shared time rather than a prescribed cure. In the context of Elfrieda’s hospitalization and Yolandi’s wish to care for her, the lake becomes a setting for an ordinary activity that could be chosen together.

Pollution and the Uneasy Promise of Home

The lake-side home Yolandi eventually prepares for her mother is not an untroubled refuge. The house is close to a polluted lake and wedged between a funeral home, a mental hospital, and a slaughterhouse. Its immediate surroundings are damaged as well: the property’s ground is described as saturated with poisonous lead from nearby factories, and the yard is dirt and garbage. Yolandi’s mother responds to the house’s position among these institutions with a wry acknowledgment that there is something there for each of them.

That setting complicates the earlier prospect of a boat trip. Lake Ontario can be imagined as open space beside a Toronto home, yet the home’s proximity to pollution makes clear that this landscape carries costs as well as possibilities. Yolandi is preparing the broken house for her mother’s arrival, with distinct floors assigned to the members of the household, while the polluted lake and industrial surroundings remain part of the place they will inhabit. The lake’s narrative significance rests in this unresolved contrast: it holds geological depth and offers a possible scene of companionship, but it is also part of an environment marked by contamination and hardship.