Our winters here in the NPS are shit. You really have to be here to understand. I know WOM posts these beautiful pristine pictures of what we look like just after a snowfall, but he never puts up pictures of the runoff and slush that come right after, and no photo can really sum up the sheer awfulness of a late March morning where you have to drag yourself out, for the 150th day in a row, into the wet, cold, cold, wet outdoors.
But then Spring comes!
Spring is only really spring is you have winter. I know people in other parts of the world *think* they have spring, but they don't. Not really. Our springs involve temperature swings of thirty degrees (wheeee!). The entire fabric of existence changes. On the first warm weekend day of the year, entire cities do the most massive stripteases - bodies encased in parkas and jackets emerge from their cocoons to be clad only in shorts and t-shirts (rue St. Laurent in Montreal is the best place to view this). Basically, everybody becomes a lot more attractive. Our lives, constrcited indoors for six months, emerge into the living breathing outside world. Patios fill, and for a few brief months, Canadians become sociable (before we retreat again into our winter refuges). And drinking and listening to music is so much better when it happens outdoors.
It will be 22 degrees and sunny today. It is not yet muggy. The smog alerts have not yet started (although it was getting close, yesterday).
There is nowhere else on earth I would rather be than here today. It is bliss.
How is your spring going where you are?
But then Spring comes!
Spring is only really spring is you have winter. I know people in other parts of the world *think* they have spring, but they don't. Not really. Our springs involve temperature swings of thirty degrees (wheeee!). The entire fabric of existence changes. On the first warm weekend day of the year, entire cities do the most massive stripteases - bodies encased in parkas and jackets emerge from their cocoons to be clad only in shorts and t-shirts (rue St. Laurent in Montreal is the best place to view this). Basically, everybody becomes a lot more attractive. Our lives, constrcited indoors for six months, emerge into the living breathing outside world. Patios fill, and for a few brief months, Canadians become sociable (before we retreat again into our winter refuges). And drinking and listening to music is so much better when it happens outdoors.
It will be 22 degrees and sunny today. It is not yet muggy. The smog alerts have not yet started (although it was getting close, yesterday).
There is nowhere else on earth I would rather be than here today. It is bliss.
How is your spring going where you are?
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