Snow and I

I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about snow at the moment.

We're buried right now. A good three feet of snow lies all around, higher where it's mounded up on our stairs. The berms are up to my chin on the road. We've got a couple of days of respite, and then there's more snow for half a week (if the meteorologists are on target, which is always a gamble).

I've been shoveling snow for four days. Yesterday and today, I was shoveling ice, hurling 20-pound chunks of the stuff across the road because there's no more room on our side unless I want to toss it onto our roof. I'm kind of tired of it, and generally just tired (which probably speaks more to my being out of shape than my hard work, but still). Part of me, at these moments, thinks that it's crazy to live in a place where this is necessary.

But I can't imagine living in a place where there wasn't snow. We get it relatively rarely up here (say, a couple of times a month during the winter), and whenever we don't have snow, I find myself gazing enviously at the parts of the country on the weather map that are being deluged. I love the white stuff despite what a pain it is. I don't know if it's some holdover from my childhood (when it was just fun and didn't require a lot of effort on my part to deal with), or some odd masochistic part of my personality, but even at its worst I can't wish for less snow.

I even like it despite the difficulties it causes here in the mountains--in fact, I like it far more. In Toronto and Spokane, I still got the snow, but the flatness was depressing.

Friends of ours have been trying to lure us up to the northwest, which is an area I am seriously in love with, especially the west coast of Oregon and Washington (which is where they are, actually). Everything about it--the 230 cloudy days a year, the fantastic amount of rainfall, the average high temperature of 65 degrees--makes my hair tingle. But the lack of (1) steepness (no mountains or even high hills to speak of) and (2) snow, or the possibility of snow, are serious hinderances. Not insurmountable ones if I could find a good job, but hinderances all the same.

There's something about the mountains, about the landscape and climate itself that I seem dependent on. I always miss it when I'm away and I rarely feel the urge to be anywhere else. There are many things I would modify about our mountains were I given the power: much higher rainfall, more dense foliage, more animals, fewer people, more geographical distance from major cities. The Rockies and the Cascades strongly appeal to me for the abundance of these things. But I feel blessed to live where I do, and to have lived here most of my life.

Now I really am rambling. The upshot is that, despite a desire to complain about a lot of shoveling, I wouldn't trade it. Next time, maybe I'll enthrall you with the internal ethical debate I go through evey time I rev up the snowblower. I know you'll be waiting for that one. I hope tonight finds you wherever you like it most.