Daily writing prompt

How do you feel about cold weather?

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Ahhh, a prompt so relatable I could cry, for all the wrong reasons….it’s May 20 and we woke up to some fresh white stuff on the ground. Yuck. Not completely out of the ordinary, considering where I live but still. C’mon weather gods. Hopefully it’s gone by lunchtime.

To put this into perspective, especially for any non-Canadian readers, imagine you are in Minneapolis, MN and you drive north for seven hours. You’ll be in a city called Winnipeg in the province of Manitoba, in Canada. Then you decide that’s not torture enough so you drive another seven hours north from there. Now you’ve landed in my city, Thompson Manitoba. We are a small urban centre that pops up out of nowhere in the midst of the vast boreal forest. Thompson came to be in the late 1950’s after a nickel deposit was found and a mine opened up here.

I googled our temperatures so that I wouldn’t be able to exaggerate them. Our coldest month is January where the average temp is -25 degrees Celsius or -16 in Fahrenheit. We almost always get snow in October and that stays the duration of the winter, usually completely melting sometime in May. I have seen fresh snow falling in June and July although that’s rare. June can be an iffy month. It can be hot hot hot or it can be let’s turn the furnace back on for a couple of days. Very fickle. July will be summer and most of August but by the third week of August you can feel that the air is different. September is cool and usually rainy, summer’s completely bid farewell. And October the snow returns.

Do I hate the cold weather? Not necessarily. I enjoy the changing of the seasons. If you dress for the cold it’s more bearable. Kids still play outside, people still walk their dogs. We go ice fishing. But, in contrast to summer, we’re definitely holed up quite a bit more, inside. Also the days are so short. Every journal entry I’m marking down the time the sunrises and sets, patiently waiting for it to peak at it’s shortest (my birthday), like a roller coaster that’s finally made it to the top and then let out a relaxing breath when the days start to get longer again, and the roller coaster is hurtling downward.

In the winter the sun isn’t rising until after nine am and it’s setting by four pm. So imagine waking up to your alarm at five thirty am and it’s -39 degrees Celsius/-38.2 F and you know you won’t see the sun for at least three and a half hours. You have to set your mind right. You can’t let it get to you. This goes on for weeks and weeks.

I tell myself that in the winter, at the very least, when it’s that cold outside, the skies are clear and the sun is out. On the “warmer” winter days, say with a daytime high of -20 C/-4F, most likely it’s overcast and likely to snow. So there is a bonus to those bone chilling days.