Simian Farmer: Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

~Anne Bradstreet

I really do love this time of year.

The more cynical part of me is girding myself for the inevitable commentary that comes in so many forms, so consistently and from so many avenues as we approach the end of the calendar year. Every year.

"It's so cold out!"
"Man, it's dark when I drive to work AND home from work!"
"I have to go outside and shovel the walk... again!"
"I breathed in too deeply and my nostrils are frozen shut!"

I live in a country where winter -- the kind of winter that always comes with cold, and dark, and snow -- is a fact of life for five or six months of the year. Every year. (Unless you live in Vancouver.) And I marvel anew, every year, at what seems to be the vast majority of the populace that expend so much energy in complaining about the weather, which if spent doing something productive to brace themselves against the physical hardships that come with the change in seasons would give them less to complain about.

I remember spending two weeks in Costa Rica for my honeymoon where my wife and I ran into an ex-pat Canadian from the same town I was born in. Small world. He'd been down there for five years with his American girlfriend and espoused a love of the life. At the time, he was our guide for the half-day snorkeling tour we went on. He and his girlfriend also ran a restaurant in a town near to the resort where we were staying. They made very little money doing what they did, but more than enough to get buy, and he claimed that the compensation in terms of the climate and the lifestyle was fantastic.

I couldn't do that.

In the tropics you get almost exactly 12 hours of daylight, every day. The variance between summer and winter adds up to a whopping 15 minutes or so. The climate changes very little over the seasons, seemingly distinguished more by the degree of precipitation than anything else. (Is today hot, or is it hot and wet?) After only two weeks, I was left with an overwhelming sense of monotony.

In Canada, I love going for walks in the summer evening, in sunlight, after ten PM. I enjoy opening my front door on sunny winter morning to retrieve the mail and seeing the air alive with glittering sparkles; there is absolutely no humidity because any and all moisture is suspended frozen in front of my face. And sometimes then I do inhale deeply through my nose just so my sinuses get a real shock. I love standing outside in a torrential downpour, watching the lightning put on a show and counting the seconds before I hear the thunder ('earkerschplittenlaudenboomer' in German) during a summer storm, and then six months later standing outside to watch that same precipitation descend in a much more stately manner as fat flakes of snow, blanketing everything with a preternatural purity that will not be penetrated until sometime in the spring.

Winters in Canada have their own sense of monotony. The monochromatic landscape, the unavoidable cold and the sunlight that seems to have fled, itself waiting patiently for the return of summer. But for me this is more hibernation than anything else. My senses are alive and I am more aware of my physical being than I ever am in the summer. The sensation of coming in from outside, having spent an hour shovelling my driveway and sidewalk and then barely able to feel my fingers from the cold, then warming them up under cold running water is truly unique.

I cannot imagine not having a white Christmas, or not being able to go sledding, from which I return cold, soaking wet and more often than not bruised. A good hot chocolate with those mini marshmallows cures all sledding ills. It's a medical fact.

If variety is the spice of life, then the climate I currently enjoy is the pinch of saffron in my days. Though a two week holiday in Maui every, say, February, wouldn't be entirely remiss either.

Hooray for winter!

Comments

Hooray, indeed! And in early summer of this year, I moved to the Dallas metro area. Not a good place to see snow. They had an inch last year and basically everything shut down. Funny, too, because the landscape's so incredibly flat here. Sometimes they get some whopping ice storms, but that's about it and the thaw quickly. You want 105-degree highs with 80-degree lows throughout July and August (and in parts of June and September), just come on down here. But, we ain't go no snorkelin', 'less you wanna take a dip in the in-laws' cement pond.

Yeehaw!

Posted by: Mark | Wednesday, 30 November 2005 at 01:19 PM

I feel the same way about people who complain about winter. I am forever telling people, "hey, it's Canada. If you don't like winter, live somewhere else." I wouldn't give up winter for anything.

Posted by: Paul | Wednesday, 30 November 2005 at 01:28 PM