Its winter. I have opened at least one post with that opening and I could start most of them with it. We get ten months with snow on the ground up here. Its too much.
I have never hated winter, some years when I was younger I longed for snow. I will always like seasonality, having too much of the same all year long is no fun. I have lived in Kelowna, in one of Canada's hottest and driest climates and even there I had winter. They were short and mild down there but there was a marked difference in the seasons. During those years I almost felt I had too much summer. Now that I have had my second winter up north I can honestly say excess winter is worse then excess summer.
It is no longer the cold that is getting to me. The worst of that is over, with the temperature climbing from a mid winter low of -50ish up to highs of -10ish, it is almost warm. The sun now packs some warmth on calm day it will warm you. I have spent time out side in a sweater and hat no need for the parka. The cold that has been adapted to, its the white that drives me mad now.
White, I have traded the grey/greens and browns of the dry interior for the grey of naked stone in the summer and endless whiteness the rest of the year. Its getting to me now more then ever because the sun which is now able to provide warmth for the first time in months is now bright enough to strain my eyes. Leaving me half blinded when I transit from out side to inside.
The eye strain is short lived. I do not spend enough outside time for snow blindness to be an issue. The stain on the mind is an other matter. It would seem that I have a talent for living in places that have the wrong colour. First the Okanagan and now the north, both lack some thing green. It took me years to see it the first time, after all I was happy to be out of Nakusp and away from the endless over cast that marked the winter months there. But every time I traveled back that way or to the coast I came a cross a feeling of rightness to the rich green nature of those wetter climates.
So I find my self now in a sea of white, in a climate that is on paper nearly as dry as the one I left in the Okanagan. One of these days I will have to find a place thats the right colour.
1 comment:
All this is why I decided many years ago to let the place where I want to live determine the work, instead of the other way around.
Tim and Marjel are struggling with the same issue as you in a way. Bloody geology.
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