Cottage Memories: Chronicles of A City Boy’s Life In The Country
Winter Wondertime
By Craig Nicholson
What’s all that clamour’s about, eh? Thanksgiving’s hardly over before the moaning and groaning starts. As if winter’s coming is a surprise. I can almost hear the Florida suitcases clicking shut. I wonder, would our country be deserted after Christmas if folks didn’t have to work for a living? No wonder our national identity is so fragile. What with all that packing and travelling and wishing we were someplace else. Maybe our problems would go away if we didn’t. Although the wife says that hasn’t worked for me.
Much of Ontario’s cottage country is southern enough to make many wonder if winter will happen again. So, it’ll be a shock to find that frosty Old Man breezing up our pantlegs again by Christmas. We’ll wish him away. Wish ourselves away, hibernate or pretend winter didn’t arrive. Even knee deep in snow, we’ll shiver behind our Great Lakes shield, wondering if Buffalo will get the next big dump instead of us. But winter is inevitable. Even the snowy season’s most widespread ailment, the “Common Cold”, is named after its sub-zero temps. So it seems, are the cold feet the wife says I bring to our winter bed.
My winter childhood memories are flurries of fun – skating, tobogganing, skiing, plus snow forts, balls and men (now known as “snow figures”). Sure, I got chilly, but what kid cares? Then as a teen, I had to start shovelling what I’d previously played in. And dressing “cool” meant not wearing bulky winter coats or hats or gloves or galoshes. Is it any wonder I froze my butt off and began second guessing winter? Until I realized that bundling up for a couple of months is a small price to pay for being Canadian. Now all my moaning and groaning is the soundtrack of aging, not freezing.
I wonder if we deserve to be blessed with this land that many of us only enjoy part time. Many fair-weather patriots haven’t learned to live well with winter. No wonder the snowbirds head south and try to live without it. Which explains why Americans think most Canadians are seniors. The wife says I don’t have to travel anywhere to look my age.
What Americans think of us is a wonder to behold. They see us as those metric millions “up there” with their igloos, polar bears, red musical police and threatened national strikes. As those intrepid inhabitants huddled along the world’s longest undefended border for better access to cheap stateside shopping. They see us as quasi-socialists who move like molasses because we must repeat everything in two official languages. And yes, as those crazy Canucks who migrate annually from the Great White North to Disney World. The wife says, why bother since I already live in my own fantasyland? Maybe that’s why she thinks I’m goofy.
I wonder if Americans might view us differently if we’d remove colour from our paper currency instead of just its value. Or eliminate the “eh” from our dialogue and still have something to say. Or if we’d invented a summer sport like golf instead of hockey. But I guess we’re stuck with being defined by our monopoly money, by our frequent use of the alphabet’s first letter, and by our inexplicable ardency over chasing a chunk of black rubber across ice. Or, as the wife reminds me, by spelling words like “clamour”, “neighbour” and “colour” with that strange extra “u”.
Maybe we could define ourselves better by making peace with winter cottaging in the Kawarthas, Hailburton and Bancroft area. No need to travel any farther north than our wonderland to embrace winter. Such as to really brrrrr-places like Moosonee or Pickle Lake, where I bet the four-legged herbivores and brined cucumbers are already frozen solid. The wife says I’d be way up there on my ownsome while she stays here, snug in our winterized cottage. There’s no wondering about that choice – winter anywhere else wouldn’t be the same without the wife and our Huskies to keep me warm. Merry Christmas everyone!
Craig Nicholson is a long-time Kawarthas cottager who also provides tips and tour info for snowmobilers at intrepidsnowmobiler.com and for PWC riders at intrepidcottager.com.
