I do believe I am seeing the other side of my first Canadian winter. There were times when I thought When will this end? and there have been moments that made me stand still and marvel at the flurries and snow-heaped pavements. I have exclaimed I don’t understand why anyone still lives here! and been entranced by the dedication the city has to live through the snow. I never thought I would be someone who would be moved much by the weather, but I laugh at how often the snow astounds me. Nearly two decades under South African sun and shivering at the thought of eight degrees in the dead of winter quickly matured into being grateful it was negative five degrees outside with no windchill as opposed to the bite of negative-twenty-degree air topped with a snowstorm. Below is a little poem about the experience.
I didn’t understand winter
until I was sitting
at the dining table
inside my heated house.
I was talking with a man,
and he spoke of winter
with a solemnity
that made me realise
the people here
are inherently different
for respecting the cold
for so long.
Later, I mentioned the winter gloves
I was just not getting around to buying,
and a woman looked up at me,
the amusement in her eyes from a moment ago
replaced by alarm.
That is what winter is:
They barely knew me,
a stranger at the dining table,
but they knew the cold,
and decades of
carefully putting on layers,
of frost-bitten fingertips
had them
carefully describing
how to respect the cold.
And more, professors remind students that there will be significantly fewer daylight hours in the winter, so they need to make sure they get their sunlight when they can. My mandarin professor wishes us good health when we haven’t been to class for some time and at the end of lectures. It’s all so inexplicably touching to me.
At the same dinner in the poem, the same man mentioned quoted, “My country’s not a country, it’s winter” – a line that completely transformed how I thought about winter. It is from the song Mon Pays by Gilles Vigneault. Here is a link to the song and the English translation.
Stay warm and 祝大家健康！