From the Spiral Notebook: Thinking about cold

Hello all,

First, an announcement: the Sidney Writers’ Drop-In at the Sidney Library is coming up on January 11^th at 2:00 pm. If you’re wanting to write more in 2025, this might be a good start. We write to three prompts over two hours, and it’s a fun easy way to get some writing in. We don’t share, so you don’t have to worry about being vulnerable with newly-written work. More information here.

Next, happy new year! I wish you much health and happiness and good things and luck!

Grande Prairie has cold, but Vancouver Island has the Butchart Gardens with many Christmas lights.

It’s been cold recently. Or seemed cold anyway, though it’s not nearly as cold as what I grew up with.

Some days I miss winter in Grande Prairie. At night, the blue light from moonlight on snow. Or starlight. Or maybe snow has its own blue luminescence. It’s like being on the moon, I used to think, as I looked out the passenger-side door at snowdrifts making glowing blue ridges in fields as we drove by.

That stark difference between inside and outside. The need for preparatory layers, for boots and gloves and a hat, just to go out for a minute.

Here on Vancouver Island, I went out in my house shoes and a little cardigan-sweatshirt thing up our long driveway twice (once with garbage and compost, once with recycling). And sure, I was cold after. My fingers were a little sore. It was a cold night and after 9 pm, so my glasses even fogged up when I came back in.

But is it weird that sometimes, even for a minute, I remember cold so intense it hurt to breathe in, the warming labyrinth of sinuses and nasal passages not long enough to warm it sufficiently, so that trachea aches just a little, so that you wonder if you’re meant to breathe this, if homo sapiens is meant to live in this place. Because sometimes I miss it.

There was one year in Grande Prairie when the solar weather was such that we got great northern lights. Northern lights are a thing of magic, so I used to go out on the patio in the middle of the night in my nightie with my big snowmobile boots and winter coat. I’d stand out there as long as I could, like a reverse sauna, until I was frozen numb, more ice than kid.

The next step is of course warming up. I’d clink into my bed and shiver up enough heat under the quilt to defrost, then fall asleep again in the delicious knowledge that I was warm and safe, inside a burrow of cloth and central heating.

I pause to think now for a minute of the people out there with no houses, who don’t get to warm up, who are cold, I imagine, much of the time. May they find housing. May we as a society provide enough housing for everyone.

And here’s my favourite tree of the whole Butchart Gardens light extravaganza.

FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

I was prompted to write about frost in a whimsical frame of mind. Seems appropriate when talking about cold.

Hoar Frost

Knife-edged feathers so small
you’d bump your nose leaning in
to see. Feathers white as angels’
sheets where they nap on cartoon clouds
but sharp. Pinions tinkle, plink
when twig rouses itself, breaks from 
frozen branch, flies.

NOTES

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Yours,
Kelsey