Listen

The third night in our new home, I hear the police siren. Or an ambulance. Fire truck, maybe. Though, I think I can differentiate. That it took three days surprises me.

Two weeks pass before the patter of mouse in the walls conjures a smirk. Guess if you move from one farmhouse to another, even if it's from a rural to an urban setting, there's no escaping the little creatures. Particularly not as the trees strip themselves bare. We all seek warmth once that happens.

Admittedly, I haven't heard him since.

Tonight is the first night I miss my old farmhouse. Not because of the mouse that kept me company there on and off. Nor because I wish I were back there. I love where we now reside. It's 'cause rain is falling as I lie in bed and type this. My son snores softly in the next room, oblivious to the storm stirring outside. Water droplets hit the roof as hard as they can, but see, this roof isn't made of tin. I sigh.

The wind howls like an injured wolf. In their frames, my bubbled glass rattles. Three or four days ago it was 13 degrees celcius here. A balmy day for late November and highly unusual. Moreso because Vancouver, which generally prides itself as the warmer climate, has been inundated with snow the past week. Mother Nature flipped her eggtimer upside down and reversed the status quo for the moment.

Is that my recycling bouncing all over the front porch? I'm afraid to check in case I get clocked by a can of Guinness. My uncle would have said there are worse ways to die than that, even if it's empty of black gold. My eyes jump to the ceiling as the roof moans. I tell myself hurricanes don't happen in the winter. Of course, in the winter, what happens are snowsqualls. And that is what the weather calls for tonight. That old witch's got one wicked courier service and she's delivering right on time.

One sound I never heard lying in my former abode is car wheels splashing through rain puddles as they pass. Hail showers against the glass, as though some giant is wandering through the streets and hurling tiny pebbles at the second-story windows of homes.

I think about Dorothy. At least I have some red footwear if the house is lifted up into the eye of some tornado. I've traded my rural wellies for something a tad more civilized. Still, I wonder where we'd land?

The tin roof I mourn. Crickets, too. But one sound erases any regret I may feel (and I don't feel much at all about having left my rural habitat). It's one I haven't heard for a decade: the train whistle. My new home is close enough to tracks that when that whistle blows, its haunting notes reach through the panes and caress my cheek, wipe any tears away, touch my lips. Close my lids.

I am lulled to sleep as the train rolls through town and its wheels meet the small space that divides each separate rail. Cli-clack. Cli-clack. Cli-clack.

My grandfather on my father's side drove trains all around Ireland. The love of them is in my blood, I guess. Passed down through the genes. Trains are the sound of home to me. As though it's my heart the engineer opens and shovels coal into, stoking the flames higher. Despite hail, sleet, snowsquall, mice, we are safe. We are cozy. We are home now. Finally, my body surrenders to slumber.

"Goodnight," whisper the train wheels as they kiss the steel.

"Sleep tight, sleep tight, sleep tight. So long..."

Goodnight.

Music: Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian Railroad Trilogy

Cabin Fever

So my car has been malfunctioning and, for the last week and a half, my little sonshine and I have been housebound. It's currently in the shop and what happens when I drive my rental home today? It gets stuck in the driveway so I'm still without the use of a car. (Merde.) And because we're a bit remote to begin with, I have begun typing, "All work and no play makes Jane a dull girl. All work and no play makes Jane a dull girl." on my laptop. Endlessly. Crazy-like...

Also, lately, I slosh out to the garage in my mukluks to gather an armful of firewood and start to scream, "Heeeeeeeere's Mommy!" as I open the door to re-enter the house, with a maniacal grin and bug-eyed glare. It's kind of scaring me. But it only makes my son giggle incessantly. I never could pull off a Jack impersonation all that well. I lean closer to a mixture of Chris Walken meets Björk, which is pretty scary in and of itself, but still only evokes snickering on the part of my baby boy.

It has been an odd month. For one thing, it's January and I see grass all over the front lawn this week as the weather begins to grow warmer. Sonshine and I watch it pierce the snow along with our hearts through the window with not a little melancholy and I think to myself, "This. This is how a snowman feels when he melts." Seeing green in the middle of Winter makes me see red. As a snow-lover, grass in January just bites a Yeti-sized arse, in my opinion. I figure if we're going to be housebound, we might as well be snowbound, too. It would provide the opportunity for us to actually leave the house and roll around in some white stuff just to relieve ourselves of this cabin fever, if nothing else. Call me Smilla, but I happen to miss terribly those fluffy, nightmarish blizzard-ridden winters of my youth. The ability to make snowangels while still standing, leaning back into great, big drifts higher than your head. Where did those winters go?

I hear Vancouver is worried about the weather for its Winter Olympics. No shit. I mean. No snow, obviously. Who plans a WINTER Olympics in Vancouver in mid-February? As Karl from Uptown Waterloo Men's Hockey Glob so wisely and astutely puts it, isn't that their Springtime out West? The only saving grace about Vancouver in the wintrytime is it reminds me so much of Ireland. Same weather, really. But I was in Vancouver two Februaries ago and massive rhododendron bushes were in full bloom everwhere! Yet, even Vancouver had snow last January (a sure sign of climate change). I recall watching a breathtaking snowfall there, December of 2008.

Only yesterday, I took my temperature and I'm pretty sure either I've come down with cabin fever or possibly Olympic fever. More likely the latter, especially since my wee laddie touched the torch when it ran through a nearby town just after Christmas. This is the very kind of circumstance which makes me question whether not having a televison in my home is the right decision, after all. Guess I'll have to feed my fever via radio and print media. (Is it 'feed a fever, starve a cold' or vice versa?)  I don't have cable so if I plug in the telly currently on the shelf in the garage, the only image I'm likely to get is some white noise. Maybe that won't make me miss the snow so much. I'm not a religious girl, but I'm praying for a snowsquall. I'm praying for snow to fall here and I'm praying for it to fall on all those gold-medal-hopeful Olympians. I'm down on my knees, baby, beggin' you please please. I'm listening to too much Otis Redding, apparently. But can one ever listen to too much Otis Redding? I think not.

Allow me to reiterate, standing on a melting lawn in January is not fun (I'll add a miserable photo or two tomorrow). I thought the one good thing about global warming, if there's any good to be had of it, is that we'd be absolutely deluged with those winters of my youth in spades. Shovels, rather. Since it has to be fairly warm to snow and since the planet has been warming a few degrees the last while, I thought for sure it would snow snow snow until we were all buried in the white stuff. And I miss it. I'm crossing my fingers for a ginormous blizzard this week or next. At least one or three before end of March. Only then will I feel satiated, snow-wise.

For now, I've put Jadis-Snow-Queen-slash-White-Witch-of-Narnia, Bing Crosby and the Snow Miser all on speed-dial so I can text some emergency personal messages to them ASAP. If one of those characters can't make it like we're all living in a snowglobe, then either I'm going to start chopping down doors instead of kindling or I'm going to don a swan dress and play russian roulette.

I'll tell you this much: if that kid so much as starts to crack a smile, well...at least I'll be secure in the knowledge that my heart can melt right along with the front yard.

Music: The Shining, Badly Drawn Boy

Snowsquall

There is a wall of cloud tonight as I race to the grocery store in the next town over and pick up some Indian take-out on the way home. It's one of the many things I love about living rurally. That you can often witness the approach of weather. Plus, the clouds towering in the sky like that make me imagine they are the shadows of the mountains I miss in British Columbia.

The way snow can whirl around and appear to stand and walk across the road in front of you is magical.  Over the field to my right, a funnel of the white stuff skips across the broken stalks toward a line of towering cedars. Ghostly fairies holding hands, dancing in a ring.

When I get home, the snowsquall arrives in full force. I love to hear there is a "weatherwatch" on the radio. Sometimes there is nothing I like better than to watch the weather from indoors and, in the winter, it's like the flickering of celluloid; some old, black-and-white classic unfolding through my window.

Actually, there is one thing I love just as much as watching the weather: hearing it; listening to the wind howl and the snow blow around as though my house is floating out at sea suddenly. I wonder what my son thinks of the wind whistling at him and rattling the windows as I lay him in his crib for the night. Sipping some hot cocoa, the logfire in the woodstove warms my eyes and, as I retire myself, the sweeping sound of this squall tonight makes me burrow a bit deeper under the blankets.

Tomorrow morning, my car will likely be buried and I must await the plow to dig out my driveway before I can go anywhere, though the feeling of being snowbound rurally out here is both magical and humbling. Like Mother Nature giving us both (and this old, fieldstone farmhouse) one massive, snowy hug...

How I love winter!

Music: Let It Snow, Dean Martin