Winter in Two Days

We are expecting snow tonight.  It is cold, bitterly cold although we live in the warmest region of Canada. Christmas is six days away and we are in our second cold snap and winter still has not officially begun. Tomorrow the snow turns into rain and it will probably warm up again a bit anyway.  There is never a clear beginning or ending to the seasons here on the West Coast, though I have noticed in the last couple of years that the seasons seem a little more demarked than in recent years.  My next door neighbour says that here we don't have seasons.  The weather is too unstable.  I think she is partly right.  What I see is that we don't have four seasons but eight: we could call this winter, or winter in two days, followed by sprinter, then spring; spring followed by sprummer, summer, fummer, fall and finter, and then we have winter again.  I have read the stats and snow falls here twelve days a year (or is it eleven?)  That is how many days the snow actually falls, not how many it stays.  Five years ago it stayed from December through much of February.  Very unusual in our climate.  Last year in mid-December we had a twenty-four hour winter and snow up to the wazoo.  The rain came and within a day it was already on its way out.  It did not snow during the 2010 Winter Olympics much to the delight and schadenfreud of the many anti-Olympic protesters in Vancouver, this one included.

     When I did volunteer work in a church homeless shelter one of the volunteers, an elderly gentleman of considerable wealth, commented that here in the West Coast at least it's a beautiful enough place to be homeless unlike the rest of Canada.  He did not seem to understand why his comment would fall like a stone on the asphalt as we all looked at him with a mixture of bewilderment, contempt and pity.  Every year for at least a week or two they have to open emergency shelters for our many street homeless, otherwise many could succumb to hypothermia and that kind of statistic would mean a lot of rotten egg on our beautiful city's face.  It is hard to convince younger people that there was a time when homelessness was not a problem here and it was not necessary to open these shelters.  Then came the free trade agreements and global capitalism and the Chicago School of Economics unleashed their poison of neo-liberalism that is still leaving its impact on our societies.  And now Vancouver, like many other North American cities, has a nearly permanent underclass of homeless people.

     Not all the birds disappear during the winter.  Here some of our most colourful denizens linger on: the red-shafted flicker

  the Steller's jay

 

The varied thrush

 

The house finch

 

We even have hummingbirds that winter here and I have seen a couple but so far not the beautiful Anna's hummingbird.

I understand that as well as relying on feeders that kind people hang from their porches they also take nectar from the winter jasmine that is already beginning to bloom regardless of the cold:

 

 I have also noticed the first hellebore beginning to bloom:

as well as the witch hazel which sends a sublime fragrance out into the chill gardens:

There are still some franklinia blossoms that have survived the first cold snap.

And in January the first snow drops will begin to bloom and even a few early daffodils and this to me is when spring really begins in Vancouver. Our longest and darkest night will occur in just two days and soon after, a minute of daylight will be added to the earth every day, then two minutes, then three...

Embrace the winter for what it is worth.  Love the cold, rejoice in the snow, celebrate the cold rain, the grey days and the long nights for they herald the beginning of the cool spring and soon we will exult in her gentle radiance of new life.