Wednesday 18 January 2012

Snow


This is not something I thought I would find my self saying this winter: I am really missing snow. Although I just spent two years living in a place where I learnt, very quickly, to love the white stuff and all the possibilities it brings with it, I had hoped we might have had a little more in Canada by this time in the season. Since I arrived just over a month ago, we have had so little here in Ontario that everyone has been telling me not to judge this country's normal weather patterns weather by this winter's snowfall. And when we ventured out for our first snowboarding adventure of the season last week, everyone up near the slopes seemed to be talking about how disappointingly little there has been.

On the flip side - when I first arrived here in mid-December a lot of people said they hoped I didn't judge Canada just on its winter.But I don't know if they realised that we decided to come here specifically during the time we can "oh" and "ah" over beautiful white vistas and precisely so we can snowshoe, snowboard, ice skate outside and hike around through Narnia-esque forests.
I am a huge lover of winter and an even bigger fan of the powdery, white stuff. I took the picture above before mid-winter had even hit Hokkaido, where I lived in northern Japan. It was sometime in December of my first year out there, just as I was adapting to living somewhere with a climate so different to the U.K. and right at the time when I was seeing all the countless possibilities for fun this offered me.

This is what my one-storey house looked like by February.


Over time, as I write on here, I'm sure you'll be able to read a lot more about the fact that I partially like the snow so much because you can do things like this:



But for now, I really miss the sound it makes. I miss walks home in the utter silence of snow falling and coating the ground in a numbing layer of cool white. And I miss the crisp crunch of the stuff under my feet when it is clean and new and freshly fallen. I certainly want more and more chances to relive the hours of time I spent walking to and from work in the slowly falling snow as it made every dusk seem more beautiful than the last. And I certainly missed not being able to really get excited over waking up to the first snow of the year. Whenever the first sheet fell overnight in my small town, I would wake up early the next morning and look out of the window to see what, to me, felt like a new world - familiar sights changed beyond recognition and a clean, unmarked sheet of white that would be virtually gone again by evening.

I am hoping we get a good deal more snow here soon for me to potter around in and feel all romantic about. I wonder if, maybe, we should just move to the Yukon?

2 comments:

  1. I've never been to the Yukon. If you moved there I'd visit :)

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  2. I'm still jealous you've had even a little bit of snow!

    ReplyDelete