💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 2-20.gmi captured on 2024-07-09 at 01:51:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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January and February are always the roughest part of the year. If you're like me, there's a bit of time off at Christmas, then there's Easter, and in between, a whole lot of nothing.
So this year we took a couple of days and made a long weekend. On Friday we drove across the province to my in-laws' place, settled in. It's been a cooler weekend, closer to normal temperatures. ~ -10 to -15 C. Bright and sunny, though. The midday sun warm.
There must have been fog overnight because this morning everything was covered with a thick layer of rime ice. This is my favourite weather. For reasons I can't explain, it makes winter feel more alive. More inhabited. Before breakfast I zipped the dogs up in their little red coats. Took them out for twenty minutes in the damp and the frost. We passed kids running and yelling on their way to school. We saw a handful of sparrows jumping and chirping under a pickup truck. And with the lack of snow, there was colour: muted: the kinds of greens and browns you'd expect to see on a faded photograph in an old family album.
Summer is my partner's favourite season. I tell people mine is fall, but really it's winter. I was born away from snow, coming to long winters mid-childhood. One in particular is stuck in my head, because we have a photo, and my family traditionally has been very bad with picture-taking: it's the fifth grade, and I'm sitting with my friends on Halloween in the little back nook of our turn-of-the-century house, drinking cocoa. We're wearing the barest hints of costumes. We're bundled up in snowsuits. It's still technically fall, but it's obviously winter. We've been walloped by snow. Less than a week earlier my brother was born.
Winter for me starts with first snow in October, ends sometime in March. This doesn't match the strict definition of the seasons, but the further north you go, the weaker spring and summer become. The joke here is that there are two seasons: winter and construction. It's a bit of a hairy joke. But it's not entirely wrong. On a bad year, winter takes up almost half the year.
But this isn't a bad year. This is an El Nino year, and the temperatures have hovered just around freezing for longer than comfortable. There's snow, but not much, and most of what we have is that frozen in-between caused by too many cycles of freeze and thaw. The grass peeks through. There's a little snow on the pines. And this morning, everything felt patched up, covered in rime that will be gone by the time we drive home at noon.