Giving Old Winter A "Bronx Cheer"

Originally published April 18th, 1995... another weather piece that is slightly more optimistic. Enjoy

As that little bit of meteorological madness uttered a final shriek or two and toddled on, it crossed my mind that all those people making gloomy remarks in January as the warm weather went into extra innings, were probably nodding sagely and saying a collective “We told you so.”

Get a nice day somewhere between November and May and you are sure to overhear someone saying, “We’ll pay for this.” It’s a remark that seems positively engraved on the Canadian psyche. There is no news so good that someone won’t feel compelled to throw a bit of metaphorical salt over his shoulder with a gloomy, “We’ll pay for this.”

I don’t know about you but as far as I’m concerned “We’ll pay for this” is up there in a class with  “Have a nice day” and big yellow happy faces as mindless modern garbage, the verbal and visual equivalent of toxic waste. I mean, there I am, doing the best I can to get through another of our interminable winters with some measure of grace and style and suddenly, all unlooked-for, the sun comes out and the mercury in the thermometer loses a few of the wrinkles it had acquired while it was huddled down in the bulb for the past month. And what happens? Is joy unconfined? Is there dancing in the streets? I should think not! Instead I hear a chorus of gloomy voices saying, “We’ll pay for this.” I can tell you, it makes a person feel like rushing home and working on the income tax.

Well I think it is time to fight back against gloom. We need to say straight out that winter really goofed this time. Did we pay for all that mild weather in January? Most assuredly we did not. We got off scot free. Did February make up for that two-week January thaw? It did not! Did we  “pay for” all that nice weather when March finally rolled around? I ask you. A winter that can’t do any better than a lot of grey days, even in March, is a positive laughing-stock among winters. And what did it have to justify all those gloom-and-doomers, those peevish pessimists with their We’ll-pay-for-it’s? Can they honestly expect any sensible person to burst into tears of frustrated hopes because of one day of January weather at the beginning of April? How pathetic. How feeble. How satisfying!

Just look at the opportunities winter missed around here. Any winter worth its salt I can count on having several episodes of a miniature Mississippi of snow melt pouring into the barn and filling up the gutter behind the cows and threatening general destruction until, with pick-axe and words calculated to blister asbestos, a channel can be chopped to redirect the flow away from the barn door. We did have water in the barn once this past winter, but it was the work of only a few moments to put down the uprising.

And then there was the matter of the water-tap in the barn. Usually it freezes about the time the snow begins to fly and thaws just before the cows can go out to get their own water in the spring. This year it froze in late January and was working again by mid-March.

So, let’s hear some gloating out there. Winter’s had the biscuit. We’re only a couple of weeks from spring peepers. Down with gloom! Ha!As I look out the window past the newly-pruned apple tree and down the dull brown fields under a grey sky, I note snowflakes. A good many of them too. Oh well, after all it’s only the middle of April. I think a lot of folks are keeping a rather wary eye on the goings-on overhead ever since that little bit of January was so nastily inserted into the first Wednesday of the month.
 “It won’t last,” I shouted over the howling gale which beat against the house with the vehemence of the big, bad wolf in the story of the three little pigs. Of course, I was right. It didn’t last.

Myself, I figured it was just another of the government’s cost-cutting strategies. Something along the lines of turning down the thermostat to save on the heating bill. Maybe they figured that if they turned down the thermostat far enough, we could suck some of the heat out of the neighbouring provinces and warm ourselves for nothing. It didn’t work, though.