In the past few weeks the famously temperate Vancouver Island has been blanketed with snow. The temperatures have remained below zero down to sea level. Schools have closed, people have lost things they left outside. Gardening tools. Children's toys. Cars. It is unusual that snow actually sticks to the ground here for very long. More than a few hours is rare. This city hardly knows what winter is, with its greenery and early blossoms. But here it is in 2019 feeling like any other Canadian town, snow being heaped into piles on the side of every driveway and sidewalk. It stayed for days, creating slush puddles at every corner, then setting hard like concrete.The other morning I saw a woman trying to chip her car out of one of the rock solid drifts with a minute windshield scraper. The kind that you can hold in one mittened fist and lose sight of. After the plow came to our street parked cars had become encased in the frozen saturated snow. No longer pure white, but shades of freeze-thaw grey.
The woman knelt on the ground and set to work, tiny bits of ice flying into the air like sea spray with every futile strike. It would have taken her all day if I had left her there, no doubt bloodying her knees and hands in the process. Never getting to work.
I think I am the only person in the neighbourhood with a metal shovel under my bed.
Snowmen have been popping up all around town. Some are enormous, unnaturally large as if someone was trying to use up all the surrounding snow. Most are not artfully done. You can tell the snowman-makers here are inexperienced, hurried. Their balls of snow are rough and lacking finesse. One stick-arm bent askew and the other one too short. Oddball snow-children with ill-chosen accessories. A total lack of carrot-noses and charcoal eyeballs. They seem to have been made with a sense of urgency, as if their creators were afraid the medium would melt before they were done. Long before the final ball was rolled and placed. But this year the snow came and stayed for a while, covering the newly sprouted bulbs of our west coast spring. So our snow-folk with their flailing twiggy arms have enjoyed a longer than expected life. Gazing out to sea for a good long while before melting into it.