An elephant in the woods

"It's elephants!" she exclaimed. "Can you hear them?"

My thoughts were interrupted, and that phrase caught me off-guard. Elephants? I thought. That's ridiculous.

I was on my way home when we heard the trumpets. The daycare yard near my work was filled with at least 15 tiny children, all no more than four years old. They stopped their shenanigans to hear the loud trumpets coming from the woods.

I slowed down and observed. The naked wooded area behind the daycare sparkled with snow, and meteorologists promised that more snowfall will come in the evening. For a moment, I thought I misheard the teacher. Elephants? In Toronto? In winter???

Then the trumpets came again.

"Elephants?" a little girl squealed. She was bewildered with the thought that elephants were so close, that she could hear them. Was she being skeptical, just like I was, that elephants were here? Was she scared that they would attack? I know I would be. The Toronto Zoo was nearby, but if elephants escaped from there, the public would surely be informed. And there was no way they would hide out at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.

"Yes," the teacher answered. "Probably a family of them."

"Oh!" she said. "That's so cool! Are they gonna come visit us?"

I looked at this tiny child, and I saw how excited she was. Her little puffy snowsuit made her look like a walking blue cotton ball. Her face was sticking out at the top, and she was looking into the woods, hoping that she would get to see the elephants.

Other children returned to playing in the snow, but she stood there, amazed. I stood in my tracks and listened to it too, but with my skeptical adult mind, I was trying to figure out what could be so obnoxiously loud.

Then I realized where the trumpets were coming from.

In the past few days, Toronto has been hit with a massive snowstorm, and at least six inches of snow covered the city from east to west. A few large snowplows were clearing routes around the University of Toronto at Scarborough. I saw one of those on my way out. I was looking right at it when its huge blade dropped to the ground and started scraping snow off at the Rock Walk. But I continued on my way home, tired from the 9 am lecture I had that morning. Of course, my mind was turned off, and I was not paying attention to the snowplow.

And surely, it sounded just like an elephant's trumpet.

I would have never given it a second thought if the daycare teacher would not have pointed it out. I bet she did not know where the noise was coming from, but she took it and made it magical for the children. I guess we all need to stop and listen to the elephants once in a while.