| “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” – Mark Twain Spring is a season Calgarians only read about. It won’t stop snowing. We watch with rising pique as it snows and melts. Snows and melts. Snows and doesn’t melt. Snows again. We are beginning to feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, our steady stream of grievances matching our unstylish fashion choices, while throwing in a few gritty observations about gnarly traffic patterns and inconvenient potholes. We ache for the arrival of buds, for the trees to blossom, for the pushing of little green hands out of the ground. Incrementally, and for a brief moment in between, we may hear birds sing, a mosquito buzz (how on earth did it get in here and where on earth did it come from?), and we feel as though we might break out in song and dance. We smile. We retire our worn puffy coats, stained with spilled coffee, holes in the pockets. We stop our vitamin D supplement and UV lamp therapy. We start to feel vibrant and alive. There is a glimmer of hope. Then it snows again. A direct hit to the gut. It’s like a wacky weather version of Waiting for Godot. What does spring think it’s doing? winter fool’s spring second winter spring of deception third winter mud season summer We are a land of chronic weather complainers. I read one study that said that 100% of people complaining about the weather didn’t change the weather at all. Which is why I feel bad for the weather. We have endured so many, many long weeks of dissonance. We’re cold and awkward, wearing sunglasses we don’t need, shivering in coats not thick enough. But one thing we Calgarians understand, it’s that winter doesn’t end simply because we’re tired of it – and that moisturizers are a part of wellness. April really is the month that sucks the most, partly because it’s not supposed to. This is supposed to be when it all starts getting better. But here we are anyway, in the heart of Spring in Deception when everything should be blooming green. High in optimism, low in reality. Bare branches and cold ground show uglier with spikes of green striving to make inroads in the frozen ground, like no one told them winter is still here. Dry scruffy patches of lawn, the colour of a dirty martini, only stand to emphasize the intestinal 50 shades of grey of the sky. Whining away the hours. Weather stories are boring. When we talk about the weather, it’s not because the weather is meaningless, but that it reminds us we have so much less control over our lives than we pretend to have. Maybe it’s just my mood: enduring my four hundredth cold of the year, in bed sending out photos of falling snow to anyone clever enough to be suntanning somewhere on a beach, too despondent to binge buy swimsuits that I’m not even sure I’ll ever get the chance to wear. There are many worse things than complaining, but it really bothers me when others are better at it than me. Callit spring. A practical joke. It’s been a very long winter. I’m calling it grateful anguish, because nature and winter can offer us time for reflection. And hopefully, gratitude. Everyone experiences a “wintering”season at one time or the other, and as Katherine May describes, it doesn’t always come in winter. Every season plays its part. It’s more about what’s happening in your inner world. Some winters happen in the sun,” she writes, and “wintering is a metaphor for those phases in our life when we feel frozen out or unable to make the next step, and that that can come at any time, in any season, in any weather; that it has nothing to do with the physical cold.” It’s like waiting for something to land, waiting for the moment when we would come to a first tentative answer. It requires taking an honest moment to look at where we’ve been, what we’ve done, what has been done to us, what we’re searching for, what we don’t have. Life moves forward by loss as well as by gain, by letting go and by holding on. We are here to walk through the mud. We learn our lessons by going through intense life experiences, not by skipping them. Sometimes you get a gift that you appreciate, but also hate. Like a sweater someone spent hours knitting for you in a colour that looks awful with your complexion. That’s how I’m feeling about the intermittent snow outside, just like that unflattering sweater. But we all have to wear that sweater. And thank goodness. Because boy, do we need it. |
It Won’t Stop Snowing
April 22, 2023 by
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