Is it just because I’ve become ‘an older version of me’
that I believe the weather in this part of Canada has been changing…and not for
the better? No one of sound mind will debate climate change anymore. But I’m not sure
how many still want to discuss global warming. I grew up sixty years ago in a
Montreal I remember as a definitive study in Canadian winter. A well known Quebec "anthem" is Gilles Vigneault's "Mon pays, ce nest pas un pays, c'est l'hiver" in which the title line translates as "my country is not a country...it's winter". My (then) young boy’s
body ran and played amid walls of snow; I built snow forts, tobogganed, expected about
six months of winter, and really had no issue with any of it. There were blizzards and
there were cold days. But that was then and this is now…and that's before even considering
that Montreal is at least 200 kilometers north of the latitude of Southern
Ontario. We have been experiencing sustained, biting cold and literally tons of fresh snow. Routine temperatures are in the negative range and as low as -20c. In my childhood, we hadn’t yet “discovered”
the Celsius scale and -20c. is close to zero when measured in Fahrenheit! Are
you kidding me? Yes, I've experienced that previously but not for a very long time, never sustained, and not in Southern Ontario.
So, I give up. I yield. Recently, I
discovered that a round trip to Florida doesn’t have to originate up north.
Someone told me that I could actually book a round trip for the same price, on
the same planes but they originate in Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach and
then return there! Who knew? That means I could work from the sunny
south, use all the electronic connectivity I have here at home quite seamlessly,
and, if a client needed to see me, I could avail myself of one of those south-north-south flights I found out about! Then, I could stay up here and freeze for only two days
and spend the other 28 days of the month wearing shorts. Beats the other way
around, don’t you think? Consider this my pledge to make that change next
winter…no, I’m not kidding!
Life today makes so many things possible.
Who knew that the time-wasting cat-fights we all have on Twitter and Facebook
could be conducted from Boston’s-By-the-Beach in Delray? And nobody up here
would be the wiser! In a recent blog post, I noted that the Americans are a
canny lot because they have an amazing ability to see the future. For example,
when the Brits were fighting the rebel Yanks a few hundred years ago and
finally decided to settle things, the continent was divided. Canada got
everything north of the 49th parallel. As we say in mixed
company…B.F.D. 90% of Canucks live within 100 kilometers of the US border for a
reason! If those dumb ass Brit negotiators had said “sorry, we want a vertical
division”, we could have owned everything from the eastern Arctic to the Florida
Keys. The Americans could have had everything from Alaska south to Mexico. Who
needs Vancouver or Seattle or California anyway? The midpoint could have been,
say, Death Valley! More succinctly, a friend tweeted recently that we
should re-open talks with the Turks & Caicos – those islands bluster every
couple of years seeking to become the next Canadian province. Great idea. Then we
could spend our winter vacations in the sun and not cross a border or pay a
premium for the local currency!
Consider this blog post my personal attempt to make light of a bitter cold day in the dead of winter, knowing, as
I write this, that we are a scant eight weeks away from rebirth and renewal in what
is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful displays of new life in the
world…Canadian spring. The squirrels come out and dig up my lawn; they denude
my oak tree for the acorns; the raccoons defecate over my entire property (but fear not…for I have fox urine a-plenty to spread around)…racoons smell the fox-pee and then, imagining it is meant to inspire dread, makes them look at me through their facial masks
quizzically. Grubs wreck my lawn. Leaves on the trees degrade the TV signals.
Maple tags clog the pool pump. I should probably stop right there. I still love spring and summer.
Bottom line…I’ve always viewed Florida as a
stop gap. I know people there. I have family there. They have restaurants serving good food (if you look for them) and great shopping. There are lots of highways because they’re cheap to
build…construction companies don’t have to consider anything called a “frost
line”. Then again, I myself have, more than once, labeled Florida as
“Scarborough with Palm Trees”. I’ve weighed the pros and cons. Scarborough
isn’t so bad and I really like palm trees. You can read my blog posts next year but
they’ll be generated with an underlying happier mood, written (as they will be) from
Boca Raton.
Peter
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