Truly it’s amazing that I’m not dead!

Why, you may ask. It’s certainly not because I have a tendency towards the extreme. No bungee jumping for me. No parachuting out of planes. No taking a nosedive off a sheer cliff into a bit of rock-infested water below.

No, the reason is because I live in a climate that’s ‘blessed’, for more than a couple of months each year, to be buried under SNOW . . . well, not so much this year . . . this year we’ve had a virtual non-winter . . . but most years . . . snow.

Below is a picture taken from my front window on a morning when we had a whole lot of the stuff. The black thing poking out of the snow mound is my car mirror . . . the rest of the car is under the pile. It took us a couple of hours to dig ourselves out.

Now if you live in a climate that is free of this powdery, white stuff you are most fortunate indeed. The older I get, the more I hate, abhor and despise it.

Although I would have begged to differ, when I was a child.

Back then, I spent inordinate amounts of time outside, cooling off my nose and my tootsies, in the frigid temperatures.

I loved rolling around in freshly-fallen flakes. Making snow angels. Having snowball fights. Going sledding. Building the obligatory snowperson. Eating handfuls of the stuff, trusting, as only a child can, that a cat, dog, or local wildlife hadn’t left any surprises in it.

We’d also jump into the centre of deep drifts and see how long it would take us to struggle our way out. If we could do it without leaving a boot behind, we’d done well.

Once, I even tried my hand at skiing. Feared for my life the entire time but I tried it.

Nothing was cooler than a heavy snowfall, followed up by a Snow Day. It meant I’d be outside, up to my armpits in some snowdrift or the other, having the time of my life.

I never realized then how very dangerous the stuff could be. It’s only now, when I look back with adult eyes, that I think: “Dang, girl, you could have died in that crap!”

When you are young, the fact you are developing frostbite; that you stopped being able to feel your extremities an hour ago, means very little. That is, it meant very little until we were within five minutes of home, convinced that our fingers were frozen solid and would snap right off like icicles if they were to encounter anything denser than a snowflake. When we could no longer feel our toes and weren’t even sure how we were still upright, only then we would go home. We always left it too late. I remember that often by the time I could see the house, I felt like a man dying of thirst in a desert. All I wanted was to be instantly transported inside to the comfort of a warm blanket and a hot chocolate.

Sometimes the homecoming wasn’t all that happy though.  We’d spend our first few minutes indoors in tears because when you introduce really, really cold fingers and toes to a really warm environment, those first several minutes are quite painful indeed. Most painful! Kind of like pulling your tongue off a set of icy monkey bars–after you’d stuck it to them to see if it really would stick.

Yes, I tried it.

Yes, it stuck tighter than fingers bonded by fix-anything glue. There was a skin offering left on those bars that day.

No, it was not a good idea. It’s never a good idea . . . but even now, some kid, somewhere is sticking their tongue on some frozen piece of metal somewhere in the world just to see if it will actually stick.

One of my fondest Winter memories was the time we built a snow fort.

It was marvelous!

It was grand!

We were friggin’ insane, now that I stop to think about it.

Perhaps the sub-zero temperatures froze our one remaining brain cell. That’s the only explanation for why we literally risked burying ourselves under a small mountain of snow to tunnel it out. Then again, don’t most kids from a four-season climate take that same risk at some point in their lives? Pretty sure we all do.

This particular fort was inspired by a nice, big pile, located right beside our house. It was the kind of mountain that is created by snowploughs clearing parking lots. The pile was so high we first thought it’d be a great sledding hill. We dragged ourselves up and were sweating by the time we had slid down a half-dozen times.

Actually, I’m pretty sure I could have jumped off that hill and gotten onto the roof of our house, that’s how tall it was.

After we’d become bored  with sliding, we decided it looked like prime snow real-estate. A perfect place to build the best fort ever. Never did it occur to us what might happen if one started digging tunnels into the side of a huge pile of unstable snow.

Nope not once.

Out came the shovels and the renovations began.

We started at the bottom and dug vertically right into the base. Then we began digging our way into the core. All this time, we’ve literally got several feet of snow above our heads waiting to drop down and bury us.

Did we worry about that? Heck no! We were the same kids who used to slide down a hill at the local golf course, sometimes heading straight for the pond at the bottom, never having bothered to confirm if the thing was frozen before so doing. We did the same thing at a hill facing a river. Yikes.

My best recollection is the project went on more than one day. I suspect it began on a Friday and went through a weekend. Anyways, we turned that dirty hill of snow and ice into a grand igloo. We added corridors, and rooms and windows. We dug until we could stand up. Eventually it did collapse at one spot but we turned that into a sunroof. When it was finished, we were so proud of our new ‘home’. We looked forward to spending many cold days in it.

That lasted only until the tenants of the parking lot caught sight of us, and fearing for our lives, contacted our parents and asked them to keep us away from the pile.

Of course we were disappointed. So we had to go back to risking life-and-limb on the sled hills. We bombed down them recklessly and with great abandon. We also tried to annihilate each other in snowball fights. We had a ball (pun intended).

Fast forward several years later and my less-enthusiastic adult encounters with snow began. I was working out-of-town, and had just finished an assignment, when I drove into a snowstorm. Not just any storm, mind you. I’d driven through many a storm without so much as batting an eye. I am Canadian, after all. We cut our teeth on snow.

No this was Snowmaggedon . . . a snowsquall unlike any I’d ever encountered before. I turned a corner and literally drove into a complete and utter whiteout. I couldn’t see the road. Heck, I couldn’t see the front end of my car. I wasn’t even sure I was still on the road. Literally, it looked like I’d entered a cloud.

Freaking out, I put on my brakes and came to a complete stop in the middle of the highway. Only problem was, I realized that if I couldn’t see the front end of my car, anyone coming up from behind wasn’t going to be able to see the back end of it either. So I started driving again, praying fervently that my tires were somehow still touching pavement and were not veering towards the marsh that ran down several miles of both sides of the road.

Thank goodness the whiteout let up after a few feet. Slowly I was able to see the lines on the road again, then the road itself. Going at a snail’s pace, I made my way safely home.

I was shaken up but still willing to drive after that. That was until the weekend when 100 centimetres of snow fell.

The roads were a mess! There was so much snow that there were high piles down both sides of the highway.

I went to work and made it there in one piece but decided not to risk driving back home.  It was normally a 40-minute drive but on days like that, the trip would have taken double if not triple the time. So, I stayed overnight.

I got a room in a really crappy motel, over a noisy bar, with the only access being a freaky, see-through metal stairway that led to the second floor, followed by an equally as freaky metal walkway that was partly iced over. Not the ideal situation for someone who is terrified of heights. My knees were shaking by the time I got into the room. I almost wished I’d risked the road conditions instead. It took some serious convincing to get myself to go back down those stairs later on to get something to eat. Starving was truly looking more appealing.

On the second night, my co-workers suggested I stay in town again because the roads were still treacherous. I just wanted to go home, cuddle my cats and climb into my own bed. So I foolishly headed out.

I almost made it. Just miles from home, I lost control. It happened so dang quickly that it was surreal. I wound up in the wrong lane of traffic, headed for a head-on collision. Panicked, I over-compensated and lost control again, going the opposite direction this time. Well I wasn’t headed for another vehicle, just one of those snow piles, so I took my hands off the wheel and let the car plunge into it.

I got out and was actually relieved to see I was front-end deep. Since I was a member of an automobile club, I had it in my mind I’d be able to call them and they’d drag me back home. No such luck.  A couple of good Samaritans came along, took one look at the situation and declared they could get me out. And, alas, they did.

So, I drove the rest of the way home, hands clenched in a death-grip on the wheel. Went to turn into the driveway and went right into another snowbank. I got out of the car, threw up my hands, went into the house and declared to my family that my car was stuck in the second pile it had been in that day and that that was where it was going to remain.

They told me I could not leave it there. That it’d get hit by a snowplough. Personally, I thought it would be a very good idea if the snowplough dragged the thing away.

Eventually–begrudgingly even–I went and dug it out.

I’ve also been a passenger in vehicles, multiple times, when they’ve gone out-of-control on winter roads. It’s a rather disconcerting feeling, as a car you have no control over, spins in a circle while other vehicles are headed towards you. You are never quite sure if you are going to spin into them or slide right on by. Fortunately, we always did the latter.

Needless to say, I pretty much hate winter driving now and won’t do it: no way, no how, never. I travel in town but if you cut off your arm and need me to drive you elsewhere to seek aid, during certain months of the year, unfortunately you are gonna bleed to death.

Morale of this story is that I went through digging a precarious snow fort, I slid down hills onto potentially open water, I spun circles on icy and snowy roads more than once, I fell on my arse and cracked my head on a icy sidewalk, I have had snow drop down off a roof while I’ve been nearly underneath it–yet, still I live.

It’s a miracle!

Okay, maybe not such a miracle but I’m definitely at an age where I’m more than pleased when we have winters akin to the one we are having this year, where there are less than six weeks left and I’ve only had to go out and shovel a mere handful of times.

Although, my mind still goes back to that fort. Maybe what I really need to do is find me a big pile of snow and start digging my way towards the centre. Perhaps, then I can recapture the moments of joy winter once brought to my life.

Who am I kidding?

Is it Spring yet?