It’s amazing how surprised you are when real winter hits you like a snowball, smack in the face.
One day you are strolling along in the sunshine with a light jacket, on a bare sidewalk, admiring the sky and thumbing your nose at winter. But winter, being winter, knows that you just thumbed your nose, which is an odd thing to do for any reason in any season, and just to prove a point sneaks in during the night with a full songbook of bitter tunes from The Deadly Trio — Relentless Snow, Biting Wind and Plummeting Temperatures.
And suddenly it’s like half the population have forgotten how to drive. It’s like we have never seen winter roads before. Even people who have lived here all their lives suddenly can’t seem to operate a motor vehicle after that big dump of snow and the arrival of real winter. I even managed to get stuck in front of my own house.
It seems like only yesterday when you were pushing a lawn mower and suddenly you’re pushing a snow shovel. (And sometimes in our new world of wacky weather, it was only yesterday.) But all of sudden you’re shovelling snow four times a day, and you can tell because your back is four times more sore than before, which is grammatically incorrect but it has a nice ring to it that makes pain sound almost poetic.
You know it’s cold out when Scamp the dog — who is one of those lap dog breeds that is genetically allergic to snow and cold — refuses to go outside in this weather for any reason, including going to the bathroom. There he is, squirming uncomfortably by the door. Looking at you, all cross-eyed from holding it so long.
Can’t blame him really, but 17 times he’s interrupted your vitally important TV viewing of Big Bang Theory and you’ve gotten up from the couch because he is whimpering at the back door, and as soon as you crack it open he gets as far as poking his pushed-in foreign shih tzu nose out into the solid wall of -20-something and backs away as if the vicious neighborhood tomcat is at the door ready to beat him up again.
No way he’s going out there.
It’s only on the 18th time, when most of the dog’s legs are actually crossed now too that you manage to persuade the bladder-bloated beast to man up and head outside by pushing his rear end with your foot (carefully), until he’s past the point of no return, out in the snowy frozen wasteland, leaving more waste on your land.
It is amazing, however, how the mutt can manage to do his business — the business of turning your back yard into a giant canine litter box — while trying to simultaneously lift all frozen little feet out of the snow and into the air at the same time.
And when he finally limps back into the house, wearing four snowballs on his feet and shivering uncontrollably, and you say, “That wasn’t so bad was it? Why didn’t you do that the first time you asked out?” he gives you a cold, sarcastic look that clearly says: “Let’s see you go to the bathroom in a snowbank, with no clothes on Mr. Human Know-It-All.”
And you say back to him, “You have fur on, what’s a little winter when you have permanent fur?”
And before he can answer with another sarcastic glare, you realize you are actually arguing out loud with your dog again — and that’s a sign that you need to get out and do something. Like shovelling the walk again.
And isn’t brushing your car off and scraping the icy car windows in the middle of a freezing blizzard fun?
Oddly enough, in all the places I’ve lived I’ve never had a garage. It’s not that I have anything against garages, or that I don’t believe in car houses. Believe me, every time I have to dig the car out at the front of the house, I pine for automotive shelter.
So unlike most of the garage-laden population, we garage-less drivers face the brush and scraper ritual far too many times when real winter hits. Teeth gritted, mumbling bad words under our frozen breath, there we are, brushing snow off the windshield into the wind and directly back into our faces, and scraping away a layer or two of rock-solid ice from the windows, which immediately ice back up again so that you are peering out of your refrigerated vehicle through one patch of clear window the size of a snowball.
But now many people face the winter blues with a stunning arsenal of modern inventions that make the miserable real winter seem like a just plain pain-in-the-neck winter. For drivers alone, there are remote car starters, heated seats, all-wheel-drive transmissions, ABS brakes and, most importantly, extra cup holders for all that hot coffee you need to load up on for when you get stuck on your way to work.
For sidewalk owners, there are light-weight, heavy-duty, ergonomically-designed show shovels with curvy handles that are supposed to be better for your back, but just cause the neighbours to laugh at you when you attempt to shovel with a really dumb-looking shovel.
But best of all, almost every neighbourhood has someone with a snowblower. And if you’re lucky, the snowblower person fires up his pride and joy snow-munching machine and has so much “fun” clearing his sidewalk that he rattles right along and does your sidewalk and the other neighbours’ sidewalks while he’s at it.
The Neighbourhood Good Samaritan Snow Blower — always a welcome and heartwarming sight when real winter really hits.
As for the dog, I suppose I could get him some of those little dog booties for the subzero potty appointments. But he’d probably just argue with me about the colour I chose for him. You know how those shih tzus can be.
Harley Hay is a local freelance writer, author, filmmaker and musician. His column appears on Saturdays in the Advocate.