It’s amazing how quickly the winter instincts come back.
Like the instinct to roll over and go back to sleep when the clock radio tells you that the snow predicted overnight has turned to freezing rain.
Yes, today was the City’s first designated Global Warming Repudiation Day of 2007.
Real ice pellets. Real snow. Real mess getting to work.
Since my house came equipped with a skate-board ramp camouflaged as a driveway (the kids in the neighbourhood have tried it out more than once), any speck of snow is a problem, or rather a challenge, as the motivational speakers might say.
If you do not clear the snow quickly from our driveway, you will either have to park on the street when you return and shovel the driveway, or you will have to take several runs to try to get up it. When you don’t make it, you face the ignominious prospect of sliding back down the driveway.
Which is why the first thing we do of a winter morning is to peek out tentatively through the California (!) shutters to see just how incorrect the weather information of the previous evening has been.
Fortunately when we are leaving for work on a day such as today, when it proved impossible to scrape all of the frozen stuff right down to the pavement, gravity is our friend. More than once, we have slid down the driveway to the street.
On this first storm day in the Year without Winter, the most dangerous of the weather elements proved to be the mirage — the mirage that other drivers will remember how to navigate in the snow.
There seem to be only two kinds of winter drivers in Canada. The first is snow blind. They cannot see that snow has fallen and, therefore, they drive as if it were a balmy August and they were barrelling down the highway with the top down.
The second kind is paralyzed. They must be watching each snow flake fall to the ground and trying to note the differences in shape, because they barely crawl along, trying to avoid disaster by not moving at all.
As we return to the ritual of the removal of snow, it’s good to have a theme song going in your head while you clear the driveway. I’m particularly partial to recalling Harry Belafonte singing something calypso and sunny such as Day-O or Island in the Sun.
Or how about his rework of the wonderful song from the stage show The Fantastics called Try to Remember:
“Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December, our hearts should remember
And shovel. Shovel. Shovel.”