Do we choose to embrace winter or hibernate until spring?
Don’t get me wrong: I love winter. I really do.
I love swishing down the slopes, skating on frozen lakes and tobogganing on Mount Royal. I love catching snowflakes on my tongue and making snow angels, then curling up next to a roaring fire with hot chocolate while a storm rages outside.
I love winter so much my wedding was held in the dead of February. By choice.
But the grimmer parts of winter also get me down sometimes, no matter how hard I try to grin and bear it: waking and returning home in the dark; digging cars out of snowbanks; having to dress small children in multiple layers several times every day.
The last few weeks of wild weather have made this winter especially difficult to enjoy. From bomb cyclones to polar vortexes, Mother Nature has been throwing everything in her arsenal at us — and the hyperbolic names the meteorologists give to these phenomena only feed our anxieties. Then the headlines stoke our memories of natural disasters past. Has it really been 20 years since the Ice Storm?
The last week alone has been enough to induce whiplash.
A week ago we woke up to freshly falling snow, turning Montreal into a winter wonderland.
By Thursday, however, winter at its best had morphed into winter at its most wicked, with freezing rain turning sidewalks treacherously slick before the ice melted into yucky brown sludge. Corner snowbanks receded into glacial puddles that flooded intersections.
By Friday, it was 8 C and raining, as if a mercurial artist decided to erase an unsatisfactory canvas.
Montreal was at its ugliest and greyest, a lunar landscape of dirty, shrunken icebergs.
Friday night into Saturday night, winter returned with a vengeance. Rain turned to freezing rain then to snow.
We woke up to a blizzard that dumped a total of 36 cms on the city while the thermometer plummeted to sub-zero.
A bit of déjà vu, perhaps? Or a Bill Murray-esque Groundhog Day?
Feel sorry for the snowplow drivers. No sooner had they wrapped up one operation from last week’s precipitation, than they had to start all over again. The tractor that finally arrived Friday morning to scrape the last bits of crust off my street was like a study in futility knowing what was coming.
Urgences Santé practically begged Montrealers to stay home over the weekend. You could almost hear the pleading tone of the statement the paramedics issued on the eve of this latest storm.
Personally, I was only too happy to oblige. At least the timing of this lashing allowed many of us to hunker down and watch the nastiness from indoors.
It offered a delicious moment of hygge, the difficult-to-translate Danish concept of “cosy and comfortable conviviality.” Known as one of the world’s happiest societies, the Danes somehow manage to ward off seasonal affective disorder, a.k.a. the winter blues, with saunas and glogg. Denmark, a Nordic country much like our own, seems to accomplish this by embracing winter’s small pleasures head-on.
But I’ve recently come to the conclusion that there are two preconditions for enjoying winter: being in the country and/or on the weekend.
In the country, you can get outside in the crisp fresh air without having to worry about whether your sidewalk is plowed or where your car is buried or whether the bus will slide down a hill.
Of course, Montreal affords many opportunities for winter fun: I applaud those Verdun parents who built their kids an ice rink in their front yard. I love to see cross-country skiers gliding through parks. Tobogganing on Mount Royal is a blast. But all of that’s easier to do on a Saturday.
During the week, winter in the city is hell.
On a Monday morning like this one, I feel exhausted before even leaving the house. Am I going to need an umbrella today or snowshoes? If I lug the little one to daycare on a sled because the sidewalks are impassable for a stroller in the morning, will there be enough snow left to drag her home again later? Will I have to shovel the front stairs again when I get home?
It’s only the middle of January and already I’m worn down.
Perhaps the solution is to find ways to bring the fun of winter weekends into workaday life. Why not an urban snow trail, so the hardiest among us can ski or snowshoe to work? Why not turn a street into an ice rink so we can skate around town? It’s sometimes slippery enough, anyway. How about building a snowmobile highway leading to the heart of the city?
It’s either make winter fun on a day-to-day basis or take our cues from the bears and simply curl up in a ball until spring.