Woke up this morning to a chilly house. The pellet stove was burning on low as it has been for a month now but one look out the window told me that it would be running a lot higher for the next while. 

Winter has landed. 

As I write this I’m looking out at the waves, blown to a good roll by a stiff nor-easter. A wet snow has smothered my two deck chairs and by evening I expect they’ll be buried in six or seven inches of fluffy white. This storm is supposed to last all day. It’s getting colder too. My weather app tells me not to bother wishing for a melt in the foreseeable future, daily highs will stay below freezing until the new year. 

Sigh! 

As you must know by now, I’m just not a winter guy. Sure, when I was a kid in Dawson Creek I was all about winter. I had to be, we all had to be, winter was the longest season, and there was no tv. Hard to imagine a time before tv, but the flickering screen didn’t come to Dawson until I was nine years old. From my perspective now, I’m so glad to have lived my formative years tv free. But it was a loooong winter; we would go ‘trick-or-treating’ in foot deep snow and would not see the mud again until late April. 

I was a pretty good skater and loved to shoot a puck around. The gravel road in front of our house was usually so snow packed that lightweights like us kids could skate on it, which was definitely rough on the skate blades. So much so that one winter Dad flooded the backyard into an actual rink. Now that was cool. It attracted so many kids that actual hockey teams could be formed. 

We also had, of course, sleds and toboggans and pieces of cardboard and old inner tubes with which to brave the steep hill that doubled as the Soap Box Derby track in summer and ran down right to the creek itself. There were a few spots where, if you aimed your craft just right, you could hit an embankment and and catch an exhilarating instant of air before landing on the iced-over creek. On occasion the creek ice would be thin and it would give way and some unlucky rider would be treated to a splashdown and a wet ass. Fortunately the creek was no more than a foot deep so the penalty for bad timing was nothing much more than having to go home to change your pants or, if you were having just too much fun, it was possible to ignore the stiffness and carry on. But it’s a long walk home when your pants are stiff as a board and crunch at the knee with every step. 

Certainly we were no strangers to frozen body parts. Fingers, cheeks, toes and noses were regularly brought home for thawing over the heat vents in our old house. The pain of thawing toes I will never forget, the heat was comforting on the one hand but hurt like hell on the other. Yet, in spite of knowing what awaited us, we could never bring ourselves to give up the game and head inside. I don’t think we even felt our feet until the skates or boots came off and then it was too late, a rush of pain would sweep through your tender tootsies… nothing to do but sit on the floor with feet stretched out over the heat register and moan. If we were particularly pathetic, Mom would kneel down beside us and give brisk foot massages to help get the blood moving. We would then limp to the supper table, eat our hamburger with cream corn and mashed potatoes, then bundle up and go out again. How strange and wonderful was life before tv. 

I survived eleven Dawson Creek winters, going to school before sunrise and returning just as the northern night settled in. Then the family moved to Calgary. I had imagined that heading south for seven hours would result in a balmy winter…ah the innocence of youth. But…there was tv and not just the one crummy channel we had in DC that came on at three in the afternoon with sucky CBC kid shows. No indeed. I was in the big city and we had two channels which were both up and running by the time we got home for lunch…Lipton’s chicken noodle soup and white bread slurped while mesmerized by ancient movie serials like Hop-a-long Cassidy and Roy Rogers. 

Oh sure, there where still toboggans and skates but not so much; tv gets to be a habit. 

So maybe I’ve done my share of winter after all…and I know that the secret to loving winter is no secret at all, you simply have to go out and PLAY in it. 

And, to be honest, there is no comfort quite as exquisite as a settling back with a drink in front of a blazing wood stove after a winter’s day outdoors. 

Nothing like the silence and mystery of a full moonlit snow-covered night in the Ontario woods. 

Hmmm? 

So maybe I am a winter guy after all…and in fact, later this very day I will be hunkering down with a hot drink in front of a blazing pellet stove…watching tv 

after having shovelled the driveway, the landing and thirty-one steps. 

Well…at least I won’t freeze my toes. 

OK…the snow is already two inches deep on the deck chairs