Onset of Winter: Canada Edition

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year. It’s the hap…happiest season of all.”

You would expect that to be the soundtrack in my head this time of year, especially since I gushingly declared my love for winter a few years ago. “I love winter” , I said, “the colder it is - the more I like it”, I said, “winter is my favourite season”, I said. 

Well, I’m now facing the prospect of my fourth winter in a country that has one of the harshest winters in the inhabited world. Maybe I should reevaluate. 

Now, it is true that Montreal is by no means the coldest city in Canada and of my three winters here, I have spent one in balmy British Columbia. To give you an inkling of how balmy, consider this: so proud are the people in BC of their mild winters that even the universities there label their January to May term - the "Spring" term - while the rest of the country doesn’t even begin to see the snow abating until early May. They go from the "fall" term to the "spring" term and completely bypass winter - both literally and figuratively. So, by all accounts I have had it easy so far. 

But I’ve still seen middle of the day lows of -35C (with wind chill), I know now that a clear sunny day in winter is bitingly cold while an overcast day is actually bearable, I know now why freezing rain is so dangerous, I have experienced the breathlessness that comes with doing something so simple as walking 750 meters against the wind on an exposed street with freezing wind blowing in your face and I know what it feels like to have your toes and fingers frozen so completely that they hurt and continue to tingle for long after they’ve been warmed. Infact, it sometimes hurts more while warming up than when it was cold. 

After living through Montreal winters, I know enough to know that the balmy -1 to -3C that it usually was in my part of BC was actually ‘Canadian spring’. So the question remains - do I still love winter?

Yes, I do. I still do. Really. And let me show you why:

1. A strange calm seems to envelop the city and makes everything more beautiful

View of Montreal from across the frozen St. Lawrence river

The steps leading down from Mont-Royal - Montreal's central park.

2. Even the view outside your window defies you to be blasé about it

3. And the countryside is just magical.

A horse drawn carriage used by traditional cabana sucrès - sugar shacks - to collect maple sap

This is actually inside a protected park where animals choose to live but may come and go as they please. Deer do not roam the streets of Montreal. Yet.

 How can I not love this season that turns everything into this pretty, frozen wonderland.

Now excuse me while I go crank up the heat.

Blog 2.0

Yesterday I decided to revive my blog. I had been toying around with the idea of reviving this space for sometime now and the blog has not been very far from my thoughts for very long. But even though I have never been a regular or prolific blogger, it still surprised me to log in and find that I had actually let this space drift for five years!

Five years is a long time and apart from bringing home the realisation that I am quite definitively marching out of a phase of my life where I may be called 'young',  it got me thinking about what I have been up to all this while. I have become a graduate student - twice over and got married. Each year, as if on clockwork, I have moved cities, countries and continents and with each move have embarked upon a new, exciting phase of life. So I suppose, unsurprisingly, blogging has fallen by the wayside though I do wish I had kept blogging as it would have been an interesting window into a period of much change and excitement. But now that for the first time in five years I have the prospect of stability, it feels like a good time to come back to this space.

But the next question was whether to revive this blog or to start a new one. After all, presumably I have changed in these five years and a changed outlook requires a changed blog address. No? Well, not necessarily.

Though it is tempting to wipe the slate clean and start afresh, I do wish to retain my blogging focus on.. well... 'Poetry, Books and Other Things'. Also, I think it might be fun to take a look back after a while of coming back to blogging to see if I really have changed much and having a single space in which to make the comparison seems easier. But most importantly, retaining this space feels like coming back to an old friend and there is some comfort in that. I don't want to make a new friend just because I have lost touch a little bit. I just want to pick up the strings of an old friendship, say hello, know that I am welcome and pick up from where we'd left off.

So, shall we...