Winter is Coming and Spring is Just Kind of Hanging Out

This past weekend, we got a got a heaping helping of Southern Ontario's hospitality. Snow, that is. White cold. Très froid, oui. The older I get, the less winter I can feel I can bear. Honestly, I don't know how the hell I survived living further north where I'd have to endure temperatures that actually qualify as true Canadian winter, regularly hitting the minus thirties and even into the minus forties. In recent years, my mind seems to recoil at the very thought of snow or cold, and I end up trying to fight my way through a haze of seasonal depression.

It wasn't always this way. I remember entire days spent outside in the freezing cold as a child, building snow forts or snow men or sliding or just wandering through bear-infested bush unsupervised. That spirit seems to be alive in well in my own children, who are basically the only ones who are still able to drag me out into the crisp, winter air for reasons other than walking to the car to drive to work or the mall.

This time it was my son. We're definitively and officially into spring at this point, so this latest dumping of snow was like a belated gift to him from some frozen deity. It was the best kind of snow from his eight-year-old point of view: packing snow. He felt that same call of the wild that I'd bred out of me, both intentionally and unintentionally. He wanted to build a snow fort and have a snowball fight. It was more than a prerogative; it was his childhood duty, a calling which he couldn't yet articulate and which would dissipate like a cloud of frozen water vapour if he could.

So of course at my son's urging I girded my loins and various other body parts with the typical winter gear and went outside to build up a frozen fortress and then pelt him mercilessly with snowballs. His enthusiasm was contagious and my aim was unseasonably true. This was a mug of hot chocolate well and truly earned for all parties involved.