A Texan, a Canadian winter, and the slow work of belonging

I have lived in Texas. I have lived in the Swiss Alps. I have, on multiple occasions, considered myself a person who understands weather.

I was wrong.

Texas weather is a threat. It comes at you like a reality TV villain. All dramatic, loud, occasionally life-threatening, but ultimately it’s all bravado. You watch it through a window, from your car, or maybe through the glass door of an establishment with functioning air conditioning. You do not participate in Texas weather for about 9 months out of the year. You survive it from a climate-controlled distance.

The Swiss Alps taught me about cold the way a documentary teaches you about sharks. Yes, there is danger. Yes, it is beautiful. Yes, I had the proper gear. The whole arrangement was quite civilized.

Canada, on the other hand, looked me in the eye the last two winters, grabbed my four-year-old by the coat, and slid her clean across a sheets of ice in winds so committed to their own agenda that I briefly considered whether we had, in fact, moved to a snowy, wind tunnel that also contained a Tim Hortons.

And then I looked up, and my neighbours were outside. On purpose.

Children were being thrown down hills on sleds. Dogs were running in figure eights with an energy that suggested they had been waiting eleven months for this exact moment. Someone was shovelling with the cheerful efficiency of a person who has made peace with something I had not yet been invited to make peace with.

I have spent 22 months studying these people. I have reached some conclusions.

The thing about Canadians, I have decided, is that they do not wait for permission from the weather. They have negotiated a separate agreement with the seasons, one that appears to involve mutual respect, practical footwear, and a genuine conviction that “too cold” is a philosophical position rather than a factual one.

When spring broke last week, and I mean broke, like someone finally kicked the door in, the transformation was immediate. Short sleeves appeared. Light coats. People were walking places instead of driving, as if Cambridge had always been a walking city and winter had simply been a brief editorial interruption.

I heard trimmers going. I saw a man raking last fall’s leaves with the satisfaction of someone completing a task he’d been thinking about since November. And then the robins came. Swooping low and loud, absolutely convinced of their own arrival, as though they too had been waiting in a car somewhere and had just gotten the text.

I stood on my porch in layers of fleece and watched all of it and thought: oh. So this is what it’s supposed to feel like.

Texas never taught me to look forward to winter ending, because Texas winter lasts roughly three weeks and involves one ice storm that shuts the entire state down. There is no anticipation. There is no earning of spring.

Here, you earn it. Every frozen school run, every layer, every pair of small snow bibs you suit up to take off 5 minutes later so they can pee and you can put them right back on them: it’s all a deposit. And when the robins arrive and your neighbour’s kid is outside in a t-shirt at 8°C because it feels warm, you understand.

You’ve been initiated. Slowly, unwillingly, with more than one incident involving your child and a sheet of ice, but initiated nonetheless.