Winter's Arrival

“Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It’s cold here! I mean really – really – really cold. It is almost minus 30c without the wind-chill. When you factor that in you have almost minus 50c. I can’t describe to you the feeling of walking outside a warm home into that cold except to say, go sit in your deep freezer for a bit and then we’ll talk.

I have such vivid and wonderful memories of growing up here in this miserably cold climate. Included in those memories is skating at the community rink outdoors until you couldn’t feel your toes anymore, getting out of the Saturday night dance to a freezing car and hearing the engine clug-clug-clug to life and cuddling until the car got warm enough to finally get going and fires at Lake Bonavista while you were skating, tobogganing behind Willow Park chapel and walking home from school with the snow crunching under your feet and your breath visible through your scarf that was wrapped around over and over again. All of them bring smiles to my face.

My asthma has worsened through the years and the biggest trigger I have is cold. I can’t be out in it long before my lungs begin to labor and the pain intensifies with each indrawn breath. I get frustrated sometimes because I would love to sit and enjoy the fire by the lake or walk through the crystallized forests of Fish Creek after a hoar frost has settled in the valley.

This morning, I saw something I hadn’t ever seen before. It was beautiful. Outside my window of the 26th floor of the downtown office building I work out was literally a vision of layers of snow crystals. The light fractured through them and it looked like someone had sandwiched the beauty the snow and cold has to offer. It can be so hard to find beauty in such a miserable thing as a freezing cold day could be. I think it was a blessing because when I sat down and turned to put my boots away I was begrudging the cold and finding the misery in it.

It’s another of those LIFE LESSON moments for me. Even in the worst of circumstances you can, if you look hard enough, find the beauty in it after all.

Winter came down to our home one night

Quietly pirouetting in on silvery-toed slippers of snow,

And we, we were children once again.

~Bill Morgan, Jr.