Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

I know this may sound crazy, considering how long and hard our winter here in Edmonton has been, but it's been snowing all week and I couldn't be happier. Softly snowing, mind you. A hard snow is still a disaster no matter which way you look at it. But the five centimetres we've been getting every day this week isn't so bad, and it has the wonderful benefit of covering up all the dirt and muck and ice that has accumulated since our last big snowfall in January.

The thing that people from warmer climes--like Arkansas--don't understand about snow is that in really cold places, the snow you get in December sticks around until May, and over the course of those six months it gets really dirty, and ugly, and full of trash. There's no such thing as a winter wonderland four months into your winter here. So little snowfalls like the ones we've had this week make everything look all fresh and white and clean, and I, for one, just love it.

I still hate winter, mind you, but much to my surprise, I'm taking this particularly wretched winter in stride. (Perhaps it was because of that glorious December we spent in the sun.) My new strategy for dealing with the weather is just to hole up like a bear in my den. I used to try to go about my regular schedule despite the snow, but it's just so much work to put on all my winter gear, get out there and shovel out the car, plug in the engine, and navigate the icy roads--especially now that I'm eight months pregnant and lumbering around like a heavy bear anyway.

Spending my weekends holed up at home has had its benefits. Rather than exhaust myself trying to schlep out to the farmers' market or go to the swimming pool or the bookstore or the grocery store, I hang out with Colin at home, and we do little things, like paint or colour or make cupcakes or (even better) just relax. We're spending less money and more time doing things that make us rested and content--rather than frazzled, exhausted and cross.

Staying in has been a particular blessing this weekend since Kevin's been out of town for work and this single-working-parent gig has really run me ragged. Today, Colin spent the morning playing with puzzles and his piggy bank and his cars and trucks, and I spent it sitting in my rocking chair, listening to Debussy and watching the snow fall outside--and not giving a damn about a thing. Except hoping that the snow doesn't prevent Kevin from flying home to us today. I'm really ready to have him back. Otherwise, I say, "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!"

After a few months of regular snow fall that snow is high! It would swallow Colin right up with we didn't shovel out paths for him.

One of the ubiquitous white rabbits that hop around town all winter. For my part, I prefer to hibernate through the season.

Canada Day

Happy Canada Day, to all of my lovely Canucks!

Westmount

It's the time of year that Edmontonians love the most -- high summer! (And perhaps the only time of year that it's possible to love Edmonton.) The temperature is a perfect 75 degrees. The sun stays up until 10:00 p.m. And every flower in every garden is in full bloom: roses, daisies, petunias, peonies, delphiniums ... I try to take as much advantage of the good weather and the blooming flowers flowers as I can, so every evening after dinner I tie Colin to my chest and take Remy by the lead, and we go walking for an hour or two to enjoy the beauty of Nature and of the City.

If you had asked me this time last year what I thought of Edmonton, I would not have said anything remotely positive. In fact, I said some pretty nasty things (not that anyone was asking). Although I stand by my general critique of the city (that it is sprawling, has no trees or street life, and its houses are all ugly and overpriced), I am a little embarrassed by such an attitude now, because, in fact, there are few places in the city that are lovely, and I'm now lucky enough to live in one of them.

Westmount, as my neighborhood is known, is a little neighborhood of just six square blocks, with old houses, tree-lined streets, three playgrounds, an elementary school, and lots of lovely neighbors. That may not sounds like much, but it Edmonton it's pretty rare. Unlike the new subdivisions, where most Edmontonians live, Westmount has on-street parking, so the houses look like houses, instead of enormous garages with some living space tacked on as an afterthought. And unlike the new subdivisions, Westmount has sidewalks, so there's actually a lot of foot traffic. We know most of our neighbors because we meet them every evening when everyone goes out for a walk. And unlike anywhere else in town, Westmount also has trees -- old, leafy, hardwood trees -- perhaps the most sought-after feature in a prairie city with sunny, cloudless skies.

But my favorite thing about Westmount is the old architecture: noble, two-story Victorians with open-air porches and real glass windows. (That may sound like a strange detail to fixate on, but most houses in Edmonton have plexi-glass windows, which make them look like cheap plastic dollhouses.) In particular, there are two streets, 125th and 126th streets, that are zoned the "Westmount Historical District," and if I squint really hard, I can almost imagine I'm back home in Little Rock's Quapaw Quarter.


Alas, we do not live on either of these streets. We rent a few blocks over in a tiny little flat-faced house that was probably built in 1948. In fact, most of the houses in Westmount look like ours, and on our street there are no less than a dozen such houses with the exact same exterior and floorplan. In earlier times, I would have turned up my nose at such architectural monotony, and I would have thought houses like ours cramped and dismal. In fact, the rooms are a little cramped, each about four feet shorter on either side than they should be, but that is neither here nor there.

Had I been offered a house to rent in our neighborhood on first moving to Edmonton from Germany, I'm sure I would have echoed the horror uttered by of some of my favorite authors upon seeing North America after long sojourns in Europe: "Oh, the wild disheveled, backwoods look of everything when one firsts comes home" (Edith Wharton), "What monstrous ugliness!" (Henry James), "The Americans have an unequalled genius for making everything hideous!" (Vita Sackville-West). But I suppose it's a testament to just how beat-down I was last year, that I now look at my tiny, flat-face little house, and all the other, identical flat-faced little houses in my neighborhood, and I feel that I have died and gone to heaven. I mean, it could just be so much worse...


The only bittersweet note in my otherwise unqualified rhapsodies about Westmount is the fact that Kevin and I could never afford to own a house here. Not even our tiny, flat-faced little house. Although very few people in Edmonton seem to share our preference for tiny old houses on leafy streets close to the city center, enough of them do that they have bid up the prices in our neighborhood to exorbitant rates. The houses on 125th and 126th Street sell for $600,000 to a cool million. Little houses like ours start at $400,000 -- that's $400 a square foot ... starting price -- and most of them need extensive renovations on top of that. We've run the numbers every which way, and under no circumstances--short of a windfall like Kevin winning a Nobel Prize or me writing a best-selling novel--could we make a mortgage on such a house and still be financially responsible. And after watching the heart-wrenching housing bust in the U.S., we are committed to only buying a house if it's truly financially responsible for us.

So, we've looked into other neighborhoods, "younger" neighborhoods with no trees and no sidewalks, neighborhoods where we don't want to live anyway, but even there the starting price on a three-bedroom house is $400,000. $400,000 just seems to be the magic number in Edmonton; and it just seems like an impossibly high number for a city where we don't really want to be living in the long-term. It's difficult, though, to pull back from a decision -- buying a home -- that everyone else at our stage of life seems to be making. Somehow they can make the numbers work, why can we?

But every time I start to feel sorry for myself, I just try to remember that we live in a beautiful little house, in the greatest neighborhood in Edmonton, and we pay half as much in rent as we would for a mortgage on it. What's so bad about that? And just to strengthen my resolve, I repeat a little mantra I learned from a friend of a friend, a very successful artist who could buy any house he wanted but instead chooses to rent: "Home ownership is a Western construct." Then I say it again for good measure, and I tie Colin to my chest, grab Remy's leash, and we head out the door.

Remy, Colin and me on the trail...

A "pretty-ish sort of little wilderness" near our house ...

Turrets and delphiniums on 126th street ...

A path "littered" with roses...

Red beebalm and blue delphiniums, a perfect combination...

A wildflower garden...

The branches of the birch-willow...

I had never seen a red house until I came to Edmonton, but there are quite a few of them here. I think it's because the red is such a cheerful soldier against the long, white winter...

Remy is afraid of this cat...

Remy thinks they built this obstacle course just for him...

Another colo(u)rful house...

You can't buy canopy like this... or maybe you can, for $400,000+

The winner of the "Best Garden" contest ... Can I tell you how much it means to me that there is such a contest in Westmount?

Winter Walks

It may already Spring in Arkansas, but it's still winter in Edmonton. Just as my mother called to tell me that the jonquils were blooming and it was "shorts weather" back home, another six inches of snow began falling here. However, just because we're up to our ankles in white stuff doesn't mean we can't enjoy the out-of-doors. Indeed, one of the few things that's gotten me through this long winter is the joy of long winter walks. Most afternoons I head down to the river valley and walk some portion of its wooded trails. Wiley Mother Nature made the steep bluffs of the Old Saskatchewan inhospitable to development, and so roughly 200km of river front right in the middle of town remains untouched. (Otherwise wiley developers would have long ago dotted such prime real estate with shopping centers and strip malls.)

Except for the occasional hum of traffic in the distance you would never know you were in the heart of downtown. The woods along the river are dense with fir and spruce and birch and poplar, and their snowy branches muffle every sound but birdsong. Chickadees, magpies, and even woodpeckers are available in profusion. There are deer and beavers, too, although the only sign of their presence is a fallen tree or a set of footprints in the snow.

I never thought that my move to Edmonton, a city of over one million, would take me "back to Nature," but it has. So even if the city doesn't have art or culture or nice weather, at least there are some compensations.

Edmonton on Ice

To be fair, not everything in Edmonton is doom and gloom this time of year. Edmontonians seem to try their best to make the most of the six months of cold and snow by putting on winter festivals, almost one every weekend. So far, Kevin and I have been to two, the big "Whyte on Ice" in the historic Strathcona neighborhood near the university and the smaller "118th Ave. Deep Freeze" in our own modest neighborhood of -- I'm embarrassed to say -- Rat Creek.

Unfortunate name aside, our neighborhood would appear to have several young families and even a few creative souls, at least if you judged it by the turnout at the "Deep Freeze" festival. Inside, there were exhibits by local artists and performances by madrigal singers, concession stands representing all the big neighborhood immigrant associations: the Chinese, the Indian, the Italian, the German, the Ukrainian, etc. Outside, they had an ice carving competition, sleigh rides and igloos for the kids. My favorite was the candy-colored igloo, in which the blocks of snow had been colored by -- you guessed it -- food coloring. Genius!

But the "Whyte on Ice" festival really made our neighborhood effort look puny. There was an enormous ice slide for the kiddies -- and for the young at heart, like Kevin. There was an elaborate ice maze about half the size of a football field, and at the center of the maze was a massive ice castle. Words cannot even describe how incredible the artistry was on this castle. Clearly someone was a medieval enthusiast. It had towers and turrets, machicolations, barbicans and crenelated battlements -- and that was just the outside. Inside there were thrones and torches and a full suit of armor!

But even that could not hold a flame, so to speak, to the artistry on display at the ice carving competition. Our favorites were an Inuit scene with four kids bouncing a fifth on a blanket (it almost defied the laws of physics, said Kevin) and a ten-foot sculpture of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, whose elaborate watch chain was carved out of a single piece of ice!

My only question is: What happens to all of these sculptures after the festival ends? The festivals last only a weekend, but the snow and ice will last right on into May. They don't just leave them in the middle of the street. They must dispose of them somewhere. And I know a little blue house, that is great need of a ten-foot tall White Rabbit out front ...

A Very Important Scientific Discovery

It will probably not go down in the annals of scientific history, but yesterday I made a very important discovery: Contrary to popular belief, the sun actually rises in the South and sets in the South. At least in Edmonton it does.

For a couple of days now, I have been drawing up plans for my garden come springtime, and in order to plant things in their proper places, I needed to know which way my garden is oriented,to determine the levels of sunlight, wind and temperature. Well, every American school child knows that the "sun rises in the East and sets in the West." So, I've been running outside at various times during the day, in the negative 30 temperatures, to determine where, in relation to my garden, the sun rises and sets. But no matter what time I went outside to check on the position of the sun, it was always very low in the sky and just behind my next-door neighbor's house.

But today it finally dawned on me. As any American college student whose had "Intro to Astronomy" can tell you, that old elementary school maxim only holds true if you are relatively close to the Equator. Once you get into the Northern latitudes, the tilt of the Earth changes that equation. When you are sitting above the fifty-third parallel, as Edmonton does, you are very far from the Equator, indeed. (For instance, Arkansas, where I grew up, sits on the thirty-fourth parallel.)

So now I know what every freshman college student knows about latitude and the Earth's tilt. I also now know that my garden faces East. However, because the sun rises and sets in the South, and my next-door neighbor's house is shorter than mine, it gets pretty good sunlight all day long. And even I know that that's a very good recipe for a garden.

Deep Freeze

Do you know what negative 35 Celsius feel like? No, I don't either, because I'm not stupid enough to go out in such weather, but my physicist-husband does, and he says, "It'll freeze your balls off."

For the past week Edmonton has been experiencing extreme winter temperatures: negative 35 Celsius during the day and as low as negative 44 at night. For those of you, like me, who are a little unfamiliar with the Celsius scale, that's about the level at which Celsius and Fahrenheit intersect.

Prior to moving to Canada, the coldest weather I had ever experienced was in the negative single digits (Fahrenheit, that is, or about -10 Celsius), and I broke that record on my very first day in Edmonton. On that day, New Year's Day, Kevin attempted to walk the three blocks to Chinatown to get some lunch. About a block into our journey we had to turn back: My hands and feet were throbbing with pain; my lips were so numb that I couldn't talk; and even though I was wearing a wool hat, the metal posts in my earrings were so cold, it felt like someone was shoving daggers in my ears. I was surprised to learn later that it had been only negative 15 that day.

I have since experienced many days of minus-15 temperatures, but I'm no longer so foolish as to try to walk anywhere in such weather. When I do go outside, it's only to rush to the car and drive to my destination, even if I'm only going a few blocks away. And I always make sure to dress in long john's and a fur-lined coat, with several extra layers of clothing in between.

Yes, living through my first Edmonton winter has been a real education. For instance, did you know that when it gets this cold, you have to plug in the block heater on your car for an hour or two before you can drive it? I didn't even know what a "block heater" was until this week, nor did I know that my car had one. Fortunately for us, our landlord Jack stopped by at the beginning of the cold spell and filled us in on this little secret. Apparently, if you don't heat up the fuel in your engine before you turn on your car, the fuel line will explode. Or something like that. Jack learned that lesson the hard way his very first winter in Edmonton.

Also, did you know that when it's this cold outside, the birds don't feed and the mail doesn't run? Canadian birds -- and mail carriers -- are a hardy lot, but minus 35 is too cold even for them.

When it's this cold outside, all the moisture in the house freezes to the windowpanes. You can't bath regularly for fear of losing precious natural oils, and you can forget about washing your hair. It will just break off. When it's this cold outside and there's no moisture in the house, you wake up every morning with a nosebleed.

But remarkably, when it's this cold outside, you can still open your door in the middle of the day wearing nothing but your bathroom and slippers. I did this at about noon yesterday, to see if the mail had come. (It had not.) I hadn't been able to see out my windows in days (as they were covered in a thick sheet of ice), and I was surprised to find that the sun shining brightly, so brightly in fact that the heat reflecting off the snow created an intense mirage effect, just like you see in the desert, in the movies. I knew it had to be at least negative 30 outside, but the radiant heat on my face felt like a warm spring day, and there was only the slightest breeze on my ankles. But Fanny, the kitten, who has never been out of doors, was horrified by all the white and cold and brightness, and she raised her hackles and insisted I close the door immediately, and so I did.

I have since learned that negative 35 is cold, even by Edmonton standards. Kevin's boss said that this has been the coldest winter he's experienced in the ten years he's lived here. Great, I thought. So glad we didn't miss it. "But don't worry," said Gina, our landlord, who's lived here much longer. "It never lasts more than a couple of weeks."