Why I hate winter a little less than I used to…

I don’t love snow.

I don’t even really like snow. I’ve never liked it.

That’s a problem when you live in a part of the world where it is winter for a solid six months. I’m flexing my optimism muscles there because if you live where I do you know that six months of winter would be a dream.

There are almost no photos of me outside during the winter for the obvious reason that I don’t like winter; it’s a season I could happily skip past. One of the few I do have is from childhood and is typical of my mood during winter pretty much since birth.

The photo shows my sister and me sitting outside in the snow. I’m in a lovely no doubt hand-me-down 1970’s one piece brown snowsuit. It’s a fashion statement – a bad one. My baby sister, adorable as always, is in a cute red snowsuit. The sky is a brilliant blue and the snow is blindingly white. I look miserable because I was. My adorable baby sister had just socked me in the face with a mitt full of snow.

You can guarantee I was only out there because I wasn’t given a choice. I hated going outside because it meant having to leave my precious books behind. Even in summer I only went out grudgingly but at least I could take my book with me and find a quiet place to read under a tree somewhere.

Before today I would have told you that I didn’t have a single happy memory that had anything to do with snow.

I would have been wrong.

Strolling down a snowy memory lane…

I took the pup for her mid-morning walk (yes she gets a lot of walks) in the woods out back. It had snowed overnight and the trees were drooping under the weight of the heavy, wet snow. And as I trudged along a memory flitted through my mind and I smiled.

And then I smiled some more because I suddenly realized that the memory making me happy was about one of the things I most dislike…winter. Even I could see the irony in that.

My father and my sister and I are walking through the woods north of our house. The snow is still falling in big, fluffy clusters of flakes. The branches of the trees are piled high with snow. We stoop under one of the trees, standing close to the trunk. Dad gives the tree a bump and the snow showers down on us, some of the icy crystals making their way down the collars of our coats making us shiver as it melts.

I remember our walks through the snowy woods when we would take our big wooden baseball bat and whack at the tree trunks to make the snow fall, leaping back to try to avoid the dump of snow.

Dad worked away from home a lot in the winter so even though I hated going out in the cold, I would go anyway if it meant some time with him. Dad loved the bush. It didn’t matter what season it was there was always something to learn, something to see or hear or taste or experience.

I have learned to appreciate the woods, more than that…to love them. I’m still working on learning to love winter, but I’m not convinced I ever will.

Someday memories are all that’s left…

Before Dad died, if you had asked me about those walks through the snowy woods I would have said yes, I remembered them. Yes, I remembered the snow melting down my neck. And yes, I remember my sister laughing every time she caught me by surprise with a particularly well-timed (on her part) whack of a branch over my head dousing me with snow. She was a real riot. Don’t think that Dad wasn’t laughing too because he was.

I don’t think those memories ever made me smile the way they do now.

Death changed that.

When memories are all that you have left, even the ones you didn’t necessarily love before can become treasured. I don’t think that happens all at once, but over time.

All I know for sure is that this morning when the tips of my ears were starting to tingle with cold because I had forgotten my toque and a gob of wet snow on the tip of a spruce branch fell down the collar of my jacket, I suddenly laughed. My vision shifted and I could see with crystal clarity my Dad and my sister and me standing beneath a leafless tree as the snow fell in a storm of glittering flakes.

In that instant, my Dad was right there with me, as alive in spirit as he ever was in life.

And I think that maybe now I don’t hate snow as much as I used to.