Palm trees out the window/winter in the heart

Canada heads into the deep freeze as I look on

I put on a sweater and socks today—in order to keep my windows open while I work because I love the fresh air. It’s November in Southern California and almost about as cold as it will ever get. There is a slight bite in the air in the morning and evening which calls for a coat, but a muggy heat still somehow often persists by late morning, as it did yesterday at Mass. Last night, I grabbed an extra couple of blankets—also solely to indulge my obsession with the constant stream of coastal air coming off of the Pacific Ocean I’ve now grown familiar with.

The running joke is that you have about one chance to wear each of the coats you own in the course of a year here. It’s only a mild exaggeration.

In my home in Canada, winter is issuing its last warning before its full descent upon the bracing prairie, which has now long since given up its harvest and drained its greens and yellows and saffron colors to dry brown, as if to call for the inevitable covering of snow like needed clothing.

My mom says she washed the windows outside yesterday, which means it’s been unseasonably warm. I hardly remember a Halloween without snow—and distinctly remember both my own tracks on the sidewalk one year after it had freshly fallen, as well as the year I went as a Hawaiian dancer - with a grass skirt tied over my parka. Sometimes the jokes write themselves.

But the last breath of fall warmth this year will not last, and soon everything will be nestled under a the familiar blanket of white for months to come, until the tulips poke through signalling spring.

As a descendent of both Irishmen in the 19th century who drank to manage the pain of millions of starving countrymen before their eyes, and German peasants who left some time during the prologue of despair leading to the devastation of the 20th century, I consider myself a connoisseur of melancholy. And Canada has its own unique brand, coming to pass through the repeated ache of bitter winter with its too-short summer reprieves. You hear it in all of our greats, from Joni to Alanis, from Cohen to Cockburn to Lightfoot—this distinct, strangely peaceful, resolute bit of sadness under everything. It feels to me exactly like the winter night winds whistling through the chimneys and the occasional poorly-sealed window frame, month after month after white, cold month.

Of course, Canada is not only melancholy. The poetic soul thrives in it somehow—living this life of such contrast: perfectly foiled seasons with the addictively bright, long summer days, and the feeling of comfort and warmth as your face (quite literally, I assure you), unthaws from the wind in January.

And the summers are beautiful, the springs hopeful, the falls exquisite—and winter, too, sharing its gentle, noise-dampening, unassuming, sacred loveliness with those who cultivate the eyes to see, a beauty only for those who will acquire the taste, not entirely unlike caviar or scotch.

But it is also melancholy. And a Canadian folk song, Frobisher Bay, tells the sad story of the worst of imaginings—a town’s strong men frozen at sea, far from the prairies I know, and lost forever to the unrelenting, merciless cold.

But the sound of this melody, regardless of its story, is the sound of Canadian winter, something I wrestle away from and toward often, aching for it while undeniably grateful for the warmth and sun of my life here.

I sang it a few years ago to share. And here it is again today: