Chagal4's Blog

Winter will be over soon…but not before it beats the crap out of us northerners at least a couple more times. It’s hard not to see winter as a vindictive, nasty, creature with a human brain and a body built from rusty razor blades and patches of sunshine that burn your eyes. It’s just that this is the time of year when winter’s charms wear off  like a guest that has stayed too long…and you start feeling that the guest HAS stayed too long. You wake up in the morning and look out the window thinking that maybe, while you were sleeping…winter had packed its bags and grabbed a cab. But noooo. There’s eight inches of new snow and no tire tracks from any cab….and the wind is blowing like somebody left the door open at the north pole. You turn on the tap and the water says…bip bip and the pipes moan and the old window in the bathroom has a gorgeous etching from top to bottom and you realize how lucky you are….to be indoors. Here in Canada’s capitol every year they have an event called “Winterlude”…primitive people, wrapped in wool and clothing filled with bird feathers appear in the thousands and launch themselves onto the frozen canal wearing skates and hoping for a following wind. It’s colourful and hopeful and the kind of thing that intends to prove to ourselves and the uncaring winter…that we can take it…we can not only endure freezing rain and blowing snow and nights of thirty below…but we can jump into our storm boots and get right up in winter’s face. That trip along the canal lasts until you remember how to spell coccyx and your fingers are frozen solid inside those ridiculously expensive mitts you bought. But there is nothing like the joy and sense of achievement that sweeps over your whole body when you arrive home, peel off the space suit and boots and feel the glow of warmth rushing over your windburned cheeks. I don’t ski anymore and I admit that it is an abiding hole in my soul that I cannot fly down the left hip of a beautiful mountain…but I learned late and when I first started I spent whole days falling down the slope…I was wet in places that don’t even get wet in the shower…and although I had several frozen parts…I was sweating ferociously. And I loved it forever. It seemed to me that if winter had to have a reason…that was it. And now that it’s gone…well…now I look out my window to see if winter grabbed that cab.