And a Very Merry, Extremely Rare, White Christmas from the Wet Coast

 


I have exchanged greetings with friends and family from Ottawa, Stratford, Tottenham, Simcoe, Wheatley and Leamington today.

They all painted the same story of dreary rain and damp cold.  Now, that's our weather. It's what we are used to, accustomed, acclimated. It is one of the great challenges of living on the Wet Coast, one that sends some newcomers back to from whence they came. We mock them for their frailty.

This time, however, the tables are turned.  When my wee hound awakened me this morning (@ 5:30) I opened my bedroom door to the back yard to discover somewhere between 5 and 6 inches of pristine snow. 

I went to glimpse the view from my front door. Pristine. Not a tire track to be seen. Was this the Apocalypse? No. 

What a year it has been.  An inordinately soggy spring giving way to a hellish summer of heatwaves, heat domes, and massive wildfires sending clouds of somewhat dangerous smoke to blanket the rest of Canada then, at summer's end,  yielding to the arrival of atmospheric rivers and historic floods in the BC lowlands severing both rail and road connections to the rest of this nation. Some of that damage will take years to restore.

Now, in a year of ridiculous and deeply unwanted records, we have Ontario's winter. This is not a Prairie winter. We are spared the severe cold. It is the winters I knew so many decades past in the Ottawa valley. There are just so many changes, each requiring adjustment with the realization that we live in profoundly uncertain times.

That said, I kind of like it. I can only imagine the snowpack we must now have on the local mountains. In a few days we're supposed to have cold but sunny conditions. I can't wait to see those peaks.

And so, Merry Christmas from the Snow Coast.



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