The Canada I miss

Faulty snow fails Canadian standards

It is hard to be serious about snow that you cannot shovel, but yesterday we had the first snow storm on the Crystal Coast in six years.

I was not very excited to see the snow as you can tell from the post that I wrote at Crystal Coast Living.  The picture in that post was taken at 4:30 PM on January 20.  This picture was taken January 21 at about 11 AM. 

The one half inch or so of snow that we received was pretty well gone from the beach by the time I took the picture this morning.

Most area businesses closed yesterday at 3:30 PM.  Our real estate office did not open until 10:30 AM this morning.

I told the ladies in our office this afternoon that when we lived north of Fredericton, New Brunswick that it was standard policy for them not to plow the roads unless we got over six inches of snow.  Six inches of snow just made for a smoother road.

Of course southern snow and Canadian snow are two very different creations.  I doubt that even late spring Canadian snow behaves like North Carolina snow.  We lived on a mountain in Virginia for several years.  I can only remember getting decent driving snow a couple of times in those twenty years.

Most of the time the snow we got turned to ice after one or two cars drove over it.  I can never remember it not being attached to the pavement like someone used super glue.  In Canada, at least in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick where I lived, snow did not seem to be permanently bonded to the pavement.  You could hit it a few times with a shovel and generally fracture it.

Our coastal snow failed miserably as Canadian snow.  First it refused to stick on most of the driveway.  By eight o'clock this morning what little ice had collected on the driveway was melting even though the temperature was still stuck in the mid-twenties Fahrenheit.  What self-respecting Canadian snow would start melting just because some sun was shining on it.

Even the snowy windshield of my truck which was parked outside melted clean before I went to work at just before one.

All of these are good things since we do not have snow shovel or anything to clean the windshield on my truck.

I am not unhappy at any of these events.  I actually moved to the Crystal Coast to get away from snow and ice.  If this is all Mother Nature can throw at me, you can count me as one happy ex-Canadian.

Part of the reason the Crystal Coast is such a great place is that we do not have snow.  It you want more details on our snow event, visit my area blog.

Hard to think of Canada in January

Sometimes I try to remember what it was like to be in Canada in the winter months.

I even stepped out on our deck today and took a picture of our partially cloudy weather.  Then it occurred to me that I was outside with no coat and no shoes.

How can you think about Canadian winter without a coat and no shoes?

When we lived in New Brunswick, our old farm house was one of those with a number of buildings attached including a woodshed, carriage house, outhouse, and chicken coop.

We used the carriage house for storage, treated the outhouse as a historical monument, and the chicken coop as my shop.  We really did use the woodshed.  Each year we would put in about four cords of hardwood mill ends.

We had a very efficient wood heater which kept us very warm but required a short trip outside across a few feet of porch to reach the wood shed.  I can remember days cold enough that you put on boots to make that short journey to the unheated woodshed.  You rarely crossed those few feet without a coat.

The experience of living along the southern coast just does not lend itself to Canadian comparisons.  We hardly ever wear coats.  Even in January the sun is strong enough to warm things significantly.  I actually will go in bare feet to retrieve something from our unheated garage.

I remember well when in 1984 we moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia from central New Brunswick where we saw temperatures as low as minus forty degrees.  We got to Halifax and found that people mostly wore tennis shoes during the winter.

Not wearing boots was so foreign to us that it took a while to adjust.  People did not plug in their cars in January, and you could run outside without a coat.

Of course Halifax has not enjoyed one of those mild maritime winters this year.  I watched with interest their latest blizzard.  When we recently visited our mountain home in Roanoke, Virginia, we got a taste of weather that could bring back Canadian memories.

It was a cold morning in Roanoke with the temperature down to ten degrees Fahrenheit, and winds gusting to forty miles per hours.

It is nice to have escaped back to the coast.  Even in the few minutes that it has taken me to write this post, the temperature has risen a degree to sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit.  We just might make it to seventy again today like we did yesterday.  That would be two days over seventy in the first six days of the new year.

That is a winter that can make me forget Canada's cold and remember the best parts of our years there.