This has been a hellish week for a lot of people.
Shovelling snow. Chipping ice off car windshields. Leaving for work early only to wind up in horrific traffic jams. Coming home to shovel more snow.
On the other hand, if you’re a kid, this has been the greatest winter ever.
Kids in the Lower Mainland are seriously deprived when it comes to winter.
I remember being a wee tyke, and seeing reports of blizzards hitting distant, exotic locations like Toronto and Montreal and St. John’s.
Why, I wondered, why couldn’t we have that kind of snow here?
If I’d had access to history books, I would have been even more irked. Look back half a century or more, and heavy snowfall wasn’t that unusual for the Lower Mainland. There are multiple incidents in which the Fraser River froze solid, even as far down as New Westminster.
We did have a few good snowfalls, a tiny handful of snow days when I was a kid. But for the most part, things were like they usually are – green Christmases, soggy winters.
Who wants that, when you’re eight? You want snow so deep you have to tunnel out your front door! You want the kind of snow that allows for elaborate snow forts, for endless snowball fights, for rolling into snowmen, or just giant balls that grow and grow until even a mass of kids can’t push them any further.
The last few days have been like Christmas-Birthday-Easter-for local kids. A four-day weekend, and more than a foot of snow on the ground.
I know what I would have done if I was a kid – started petitioning to head to the best local hills.
There were a precious few good snow years when I was young enough to go sledding. We had some friends who lived at the top of a big hill.
But when I was just a year or two older, the best hill proved to be on a nearby gas pipeline right of way. I mean, you had to jump a fence and ignore a pesky No Trespassing sign (hey kids, don’t do this!) but then you had access to a steep, straight drop.
If you’ve got kids, I hope you’re letting them store up plenty of memories. This is the big one, the winter they’ll remember for years.
If you don’t, I hope you have a chance to get out in the snow for at least a little while, to remember what it felt like to love winter. Then you can go back to shovelling the walk.
