Winter Tales

It’s a crisp night, but not cold enough to tempt the spattering of rain to transform into flakes. There is a whiff of wood smoke in the air and the echo of the train’s whistle is drifting up from the waterfront. This is winter on the west coast – a rather green affair. We have just put January to bed and already the spring bulbs are sending feelers up through the soil. This is Canada’s banana belt.

Although I’ve lived most of my life on the west coast I wasn’t born here. I’m  at home here, this is my place in the world. The ocean, the giant trees, the mountains, have taken my breath away for almost fifty years – half a century of awe.

I was originally a prairie kid, and lived back in the olden days. Winters for me were a whole other thing. I breathed icy air and squinted into the glare of snow so bright it was blue. My breath froze in the folds of the wool scarves my grandmother knitted and my nostrils stuck to themselves when I inhaled. Days were dazzling.

They call the cold ‘dry’ on the prairies, the snow is like powder and drifts in giant waves. The wind bites, the sun shines and the sky is blue. Winters are long and hard, white and bright.

Here on the coast you know it’s winter when rain comes in torrents and gusts of wind whip the trees. Rooftops become littered with branches, eaves are stuffed with decaying leaves and pine needles. Gutters overflow and cascade like water features. It’s grey, the sky is heavy. The world seems tucked into the heavens – blanketed in gloom. The trees droop, weary of the weight of water, grass swims in a spongey lake. The thermometer hovers above freezing most of the time.

Admittedly a person can grow weary of the days on end of rain – but one sunny afternoon sets everything to right. If the sun sneaks out on a Tuesday, true west-coasters couldn’t tell you if it rained last Thursday, though chances are pretty good it did. There’s a price to pay for all this green, and a way to cope with it – selective memory.

We know how to dress for the weather here, even the dogs have rain coats. Our winter footwear is colorful, if not stylish. Puddles are perfection if you’re wearing the right shoes. The kids think nothing a winter storm – rain is no big deal.

To west coast kids a snow day is a treat – cause to stick your tongue out and taste the weather. We learned early, on the prairies, to keep our tongues in our mouths when the temperature dropped, lest someone get theirs stuck on the frosted metal bars of the swing set.

My granddaughters looked at me like I was crazy when I told them the story about the swing set. They have no way of knowing just how delicious frosty metal can look. They will never understand the lure to lick it, or the panic you feel the moment the frost grabs your tongue. If you happened to be in your own backyard when the temptation struck, your sister could race into the house for a cup of warm water and free you. Your tongue would sting for a while, but it recovered quickly. If you were unfortunate and at school when the lure of the frost overcame you…. and then the bell rang and all the other kids raced back into the school, leaving you alone and glued to the swing set….. well, that was another thing altogether. That was the moment a prairie kid found out what they were made of. Would you stand outside, alone on the playground, until the teacher noticed you hadn’t returned from recess? Or, would you bite the bullet and free yourself knowing it was going to hurt like hell?

My grandmother used to tell us stories about her youth In rural Manitoba, stories about a time that now only lives in history books, the days of yore. Stories about laundry, frozen stiff on the clothesline; slacks that could stand up on their own – sheets with missing corners, broken off by a careless bump. She’d tell us about lunches that froze on a walk to school and the lobbying for a spot near the heater so the sandwich could thaw before noon. Hers were the olden days in the extreme. Those days were colder, those kids, tougher. I don’t think swing sets had even been invented when my grandmother was a child – and if they were, my grandmother probably knew better than to try licking the frost off one.

As my granddaughters gather the stories that will become their olden days, I find myself wondering how a rainy west coast winter will stack up to the tales from the prairies. Where I had to compete with laundry so cold that it shattered if you dropped it, these little girls will have to think hard to beat a tale about a curious kid who stuck her tongue to a swing-set. I’m sure they will come up with something – by the time these days become olden the girls will be grandmothers themselves. And us old girls can generally be counted on for a story or two.