To a Tourist

You've been thinking of visiting our continent? You're coming to Canada, our northern home and native land? The province of Ontario, you say? Waterloo County? Thirteenfiftyapplegroveroad, along the back lane? In the WINTER??!!

Oh, please do.

All the stuff they say about winter's intensity, unpredictability, and longevity is true. All the snowing, blowing, freezing, thawing, drifting, skidding, ditching, crunching, slushing and mudding that you've heard about really does happen here.

People actually do put up with negatives in winter life that range from trifling inconveniences to considerable dangers. They pull on extra sweaters or huddle under blankets in the living room of a furnaced house, scrape ice off their car's windshield, peer out from under frosty eyebrows to watch their breath puff into mini clouds and disappear, cancel church services, drive stretches of road blind in complete whiteouts, repair burst water pipes, and dig out their porches and vehicles after yet another blizzard.

Don't you just want to pack your bags and head for here now?

What you may not have heard, though, is how versatile our winter is; how wondrous and beauteous it makes things around here. The Maker of the ice and snow labels His creation "treasures", with good reason.

Let me illustrate:

In the slate greys and blues of a winter afternoon's landscape, you can stand and make tall, skinny shadows a long way across the snow-dappled lawn.

After a thaw-and-freeze, you can go for a walk to the bush and break through the top crust of the snow with every step. It's such a crunchy, down-to-earth experience.

After an ice storm, a stroll through the orchard is a dazzling exploration. 

The sun gleaming on the icy expanse seems to turn the back yard into a frozen pond. and makes you want to don skates and go for a spin. 

Meanwhile, some fascinating icicle craft is taking shape.

You can (not me, but if you're a skillful sculptor) carve something marvelous into the snow or ice and have other people come look at it to ooh and aah over the creation.

Or to come look at it to laugh aloud, and then to smile again when they think back on it in days to come.

                      

You can stay inside the house on Snow Days - or Snow Events, as they are sometimes called, making them sound So Important - and not go out at all while it is blizzarding so hard and fast you can't even see the orchard trees, let alone the bush trees beyond them, when you look out the windows to the south. The only time you open the front door that day is when you want to see how much and how amazing is the blizzartistry on the porch.

You can watch people who are fishing in the river ice with their buddies and making beautiful patterns in the snow as they walk from one hole to another.

For these experiences, you don't need to make reservations online ahead of time, you don't need to wait hours in line for your turn, and you don't have to jostle a crowd to see and participate once you do reach the spot of interest. Oh, and did I mention they're free?

For these experiences, there aren't any restrictions, precautions or guidelines to heap on you, either. The only advice you might consider is "Take care that you don't get bowled over by all the beauty out there!"

                                                                                       (Photo Credit: Kerra Martin)
On another note:
Winter also makes a pretty great background for engagement photos, as this couple found out this past weekend. (Yes, our daughter Kayleen got engaged to Carlin Atkinson on March 1, so there's a lot of excitement and wedding talk going on around here. A November wedding is in the works.)

This Post's Quotable:

On a very-Canadian weekend in Ottawa recently, our family skated on the Rideau Canal and ate beavertails, fried dough pastries that are shaped to resemble a beaver's tail, because those two activities are just what you do when you're in Ottawa in the winter. One time that weekend our son overheard somebody "verbalizing" the beavertail: "Are we beavertailing now or later?"

This Post's Childhood Memory:

I used to love building snow forts with my siblings, cousins, or schoolmates. I remember sawing blocks or slabs of snow from the packed top layer of drifts in our field, and fashioning fort walls by stacking these blocks alternately, brick-style. Another method of building forts was to select snow chunks from the snow piles pushed up by the snow plow in our lane at home or in the driveway at school. What an accomplishment to raise a whole little "house" by stacking snow chunks in walls sometimes higher than our heads! To be in that fort made by our own mittened hands gave such a cozy, contented feeling in spite of the cold.