Margaret Westlie on Reading, Writing and Life
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It was snowing yesterday and the day before, and I was thinking back to other years and how we always experience seasons. As a Canadian, I have always enjoyed distinct seasons, each with its own activities and pleasures. I lived in Missouri for thirty years and missed the seasons. Missouri seasons are either too hot or not cold enough. The first winter I lived there, my whole system was confused until I finally realized the cause. It had been a particularly warm winter without snow, and in January all I needed outdoors was a sweater. It occurred to me then that something was not right, but on further reflection it was because I was missing a season. To me it had just been one extra long summer. We had gone from tornado season to tornado season with hardly a break. I missed my snow. I missed cross country skiing, snowshoeing, skating on the pond, and being snug by the fire while the wind blew and piled up drifts of snow around the house.
Since returning to Canada, I’ve been able to return to a proper seasonal cycle. Except one year, we had a little too much seasoning, and I had a small thought in a tiny corner of my brain that in Missouri, crocuses and daffodils would already in be in bloom, and we still had about 243 cm (8 feet) of snow in our back yard despite over a week of sunshine and melting. The forecast called for two more snowstorms over the weekend, one of which would drop another 15 cm (6 inches). That whole winter officially measured 515 cm (16.8 feet).
We may see grass by the end of May. One year the meadow mice made a whole city under the snow. Their tracks and highways through the lawn went for long distances and took in the scenery of the garden in winter and a maple tree. I hoped my maple tree would survive. It was really only a teenager then, and the mice had had a party on the bark. I didn’t think it would survive that year, but it did, and the next year we were determined to wrap the trunk and spoil the mouse festivities. But we were too late, and tree wrap was all gone from the stores. The tree was so buried in snow that winter that we couldn’t even see the top twigs. The mice could have built a mousie skyscraper.
