Grumpy old woman telling snow to get off her lawn

Vancouver has been receiving a lot of snow this week and when I say a lot of snow, I mean like 30 cm lol. This is nothing compared to the rest of Canada, but as a city, we are so ill-prepared for snow. There are people driving out there with no snow tires (what the actual fuck) and buses getting stuck and skytrain doors freezing shut.

Luckily, I have the option of working from home so I have been doing that for the past 3-4 days. It reminds me of when I used to work from home due to my broken knee and I went psycho being trapped in these 4 walls.

So what have I been thinking about in my solitude? How much I hate snow and why that is.

I hate snow. I like it if I am snowboarding, but I prefer snow to stay on the mountains where I can go to if I want to see it. In my daily life, I don’t want to see it at all.

I don’t want to scrape ice off my car in the morning. I don’t want to shovel so I can get out of my parking lot. I don’t want to transit in the snow, walk in the snow, dress up for the snow. I don’t want to be stuck in traffic or watch cars dangerously spin out of control in front of me.

These are all real dangers of snow and very valid, but a part of me wonders when the hell I became such a grumpy old woman.

As a child, I liked the snow. I prayed for snow days and would spend hours in my backyard building snow castles. I ranked myself as a top snowball maker – my snowballs are perfectly round and cute. I enjoyed the quiet crunchy sounds under my feet when I walked on a bed of fresh snow. I thought snow was beautiful.

Snow is still beautiful, but only if you do not have to go outside and look at it from inside your warm house in a robe and a cup of coffee. This is what I believe now.

I suppose growing up is when all these kinds of realities hit. Suddenly, you are afraid of slipping on black ice and mom no longer needs to remind you to wear a jacket because you will definitely be wearing a jacket. It is damn cold.

I wonder what other magical things have been stripped away by a feeling of inconvenience, which in turn has changed my feelings of like to disdain. Christmas is a lie and presents get more and more expensive every year. The tooth fairy is probably your parents keeping your rotting baby teeth in a box in the attic somewhere. Birthdays suck because you are getting older and for some reason now you are embarrassed to tell people your age.

My mom was telling me the story of how our neighbours all came out to help shovel and that it was actually very nice. For context, we live in a townhouse complex with an outdoor parking lot. This means nobody has a garage and everybody’s cars are parked outside. My mom tells me that when we first moved here, most of our neighbours were selfish. They would go out and shovel but only their own little paths to the car and only to the white lines of their own parking spot.

My mom, who was 10 years younger at the time, shoveled the snow for other people. She shoveled the snow for one of our neighbours, a family who seemed to never be around for half the year (conveniently during winter). She also shoveled for another neighbour, an elderly couple. She did this every year and one year, another neighbour of ours came up to talk to her. She described him as a fat man who smokes outside his house (lol). He told her that she did not need to shovel other people’s spots and that she can just shovel her own spot. She ignored him.

Now 9-10 years later, my mother is not as fit or strong as before but she is still out there shoveling the snow. This year, it seems like more people came out to help her and there was no more “I’ll shovel my own spot” mentality. Everybody was shoveling each other’s spots and helping each other out, which my mother thought was very nice. She feels like maybe she helped change our little neighbourhood for the better.

In the last 10 years, we’ve had old neighbours move out and new ones come in. I still wouldn’t know anybody’s name if you asked me because I didn’t particularly like any of our neighbours when we first moved in. Everybody kind of kept to themselves.

My mom’s story made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside like a bad Christmas movie. I think to myself that maybe the snow is not that bad. It still brings people together. And maybe that is magic.

Sincerely, Loewe