Hope Preferred

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I unequivocally hate the winter.  Everything about the winter.  The cold.  The snow. The ice.  The wind.  You get the picture.

But I don't think I would complain about it so much if I lived in say, southern Ontario, where winter lasts the length of time the calendar says it lasts.... you know, three months.

Not in Atlantic Canada.  

No, the cold weather starts in early November; the first snowfall is usually then, and it gets colder and colder until the first major snowstorm around New Year's Day.  Throughout the cold snap and thaw in January and the February deep freeze (the longest month of the year for me), and then the bitter winds of March, followed by the freezing rain / ice storms of April, the weather doesn't get warm again until nearly the first of May.  Almost six months.  It's not that we get a LOT of snow here.  Sometimes we do, sometimes not.  It's just that winter lasts such a LONG time.  If it wasn't for our maples and our other friends, I don't know what I'd do.

The maples are the first harbingers of spring.  They very slowly, very deliberately form a little bulge on the tips of their branches.  The promise of a bud.  It's then that I start listening, straining with my subconscious ears, for the next sign: the sounds of Canada geese, like little John Allen Cameron wannabes, returning from the sunny south.  And once I've heard that, I start looking out our living room window.  Not out at the lawn but down - down near the place where the house meets the ground, where some heat has escaped and made a mini-ravine behind the snowbank left by layer after layer of snowblower's leavings.  

In that small ravine I look for the hardiest, pluckiest souls of spring: the crocus. I try not to think about how they usually meet their end - in a howling Nor-easter that deposits ice half an inch thick on all the tree branches and bows the crocus blooms in humiliation to the earth for their optimism.

Once they have made an appearance, though, it does give me more hope. And hope is preferable to the despondency that sets in during the deepest, bleakest winter months of January through to March.  Once the crocus blithely poke their way through the snow, I know that there are only a few more weeks until my own personal official sign that spring will have finally arrived: when the last pair of robins has to settle for our now-budded maples in which to make their nest.  The robins in general avoid our property like the plague because we only have an indoor cat, and therefore every other outdoor cat in the neighborhood makes our garden its litter box; the smell of cat is everywhere to those sensitive bird nostrils.  

In the meantime, between the crocus and the robins, I thrill to the sound of mourning doves cooing on our rooftop early in the morning, as they speed-date their way to a nest full of eggs.  

Yes, that feeling of hope is preferred.  It means that the cruel and punishing icy gales are going to stop for another season, we'll be able to put away our bulky winter coats and enjoy more hours of daylight.

Some days, that hope, that assurance, is the only thing that gets me through the tough times when I wonder if winter will ever end.

It always does. Spring always comes.