The days of stew and shovelling

Opinion

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This article was published 09/03/2024 (545 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The novelty has worn off. I know it’s been an easy winter, and we haven’t had the regular long stretches of bone-chilling cold, but it’s beginning to get tiresome.

I’m not tired of the overnights, when the fleets of snow plows are creeping down the street like a collection of massive shorebirds, worrying and picking at the drifts like they’re searching mudflats for food, tidying the street corners, grunting and clanking off into the dark.

I like the order of their mechanical ballet, the regular audiovisual pulse of their flashing lights and strident backup alarms.

But I am tired of clearing the back lane and hunting for new places to put the snow, tired of crunching away from the bus on the nubbins and cracklings of flash-frozen slush, and especially tired of sidewalks that masquerade neatly as bare pavement but are actually snow-polished squares of exquisitely slick ice. (My bruised right knee and hip especially thank them this week for their slippery service, for their jarring reality check of sending me soaring before abrupt deceleration.)

You watch the people around you, struggling through the complexity of their days, wrapped head to toe, and you can’t even tell them you understand completely, that you’ve been there too, that you’ve done and are doing all of those things. Walkers are heads-down, studying their feet and their footing, faces covered, anything like a smile kept tightly to themselves.

It’s been such an odd winter that I haven’t even managed to get my cross-country skis out of the furnace room: the too-few days of solid cold and fresh snow just haven’t aligned themselves.

Instead, I’ve sharpened and polished my excuses for personal torpor.

I admit there are small benefits to late winter’s house arrest. The days of stews: pork and eggplant, with cumin, garlic and bay leaves; a whole chicken that overnights in the crock pot before its eventual deconstruction among potatoes, celery and star anise.

But stews only go so far.

While I wait, I have discovered there is an entire cadre, a virtual library, of extra-long videos of intense middle-aged men — always men — recording themselves industriously unplugging blocked culverts.

They set up ornate multi-smartphone shoots, working alone, with chest-mounted and tripod-mounted cameras at the site of the blockage, and another smartphone poised on the other side of the road, to record for posterity the sudden gushing success of the reopened pipe. There is even a smaller subset of the culvert video genre, devoted to video of freeing penned water from the clutches of evil beavers — who no doubt simply come back and block the culverts once again.

It is a sin of lesser sloth: like watching a video on mixing patching cement, I can convince myself, however fleetingly, that I am learning something marginally important, not merely marking time.

I am told there is a place for posting photographs and videos of particularly artful dishwasher loading techniques: it is a rabbit hole too deep, even for me, to go down.

Outside, there are still found treasures — but it takes more steps to find them than it did at winter’s outset, when snow and ice were fresh and new.

At 6 a.m., you might discover a steady wind from the north has carved away all the loose snow from around a small child’s snow angel, leaving a peculiar and slightly frightening relief of the original, its creator long gone to school or daycare, not even boot marks left behind.

You might still revel in the fast-frozen corn-starch crunch of snow underfoot, while also being glad there is just enough snow to cap the slick ice beneath.

And there’s the brightening sky, earlier each morning, high, dry blue with a peach blush at the horizon.

It’s only early March — I know that. But I’m more than ready for a change. For the wet-rot smell of the real melt, for the bird sounds to be more than fractious house sparrows hiding in cedars and the occasional urgent knocking of an industrious woodpecker. I heard a flicker tapping out its version of a Tinder message on a metal gas-furnace chimney cap a week ago — not sure of the response — so there’s a little hope.

I want the snow to go away and steady rain to wash the grey dust off everything, the smut of winter heading for the storm drains.

Right now, even little things make a difference.

A couple times a week, a neighbour behind us leaves their backyard-fence string of lights on overnight, a line of clear teardrop-shaped incandescent orbs that glow yellow-orange against the blues and greys of morning’s first light.

I like to think they’ve left them plugged in on purpose, if for no other reason than to remind everyone who can see them that longer spring evenings aren’t really that far away.

It is a twinkle like hope.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.com