It’s starting to snow again in Vancouver – the latest in a series of unseasonable events this winter in what’s supposed to be Canada’s mild West Coast.
Few things take me back to childhood as much as the sight of white flakes in the sky. I see them, and I’m suddenly transported back to the living room window of our house on Bearbrook Road, wondering if this would be the snowfall that closed the schools for the day. Or the front passenger seat of my parents’ car, with my dad driving, windshield wipers urgently dialing slush off the windshield, and the snow doing that swooping-toward-you thing it does when you’re in a moving car – a feeling of danger barely held at bay by the reassuring presence of a parent. Or walking home from a friend’s house at eight or nine, when the sky turned orange with reflected streetlight and the tires of passing cars crunched grooves in the road.
Up at the cottage, a snowfall meant a tense crawl approach along the 20 kilometres or so of gravel road that led to the cabin on Big Mink Lake – and three or four big, winding hills I would be convinced would be the last sight I ever had on this Earth. Then we’d park at the entrance to the driveway and load the toboggan for the first of three or four portages: clothing, toys, meals, various staples and, if it was Christmas, presents and Mom’s baking.
It’s been more than 25 years since my last hopeful gaze at the flurries outside our living room window; nine years since my last Christmas at the cottage; and three years to the day since my mother died – three years minus five days since my father joined her. Then, too, it was an unseasonable winter, but in Bancroft, Ontario, colder-than-normal weather is vastly more frigid. The last month or so of their lives was spent entirely indoors, except for a brief few moments as my father was transferred to hospital.
I wish I could find a way, other than through memory, to be back in the car while Mom or Dad drives home through a snowstorm. I’ve come now to recognize that danger can be held back at best temporarily, and that uneasy feeling of contingency as a glimpse of what life really is. Permanence is an illusion, and warmth, cold, pain, tenderness, the feeling of a hand cooling slowly in mine – these all melt away into memory, as surely as does every snowfall.
(Written on Jan. 10)
