A broken tulip

It’s an unseemly amount of snow for the end of February but we forgive the skies, because this winter has been a mild one so far.

I head down the street with a bright yellow shovel. There’s an elderly woman who I call up every time it snows. “Are you going anywhere today?” I ask. “Bowling with my girlfriends,” she’ll say. If she bowls anything like she talks, I’m sure she wins every time. Her and her neighbour are Acadians, from the Eastern provinces, and she talks clean, crisp, and straight to the point.

Yesterday’s snow was so wet it melted faster than it could pile onto the pavement; overnight it chilled enough to pile over everyone’s driveways. 19 centimetres deep the weather folk say. It’s heavy to move, like lifting weights. I pile it high, hedging her driveway in with thick walls.

It’s only seven in the morning but the street is coming alive with activity. Neighbours pull out their snow blowers. They start with a sound as noisy as if a whole tribe of woodpeckers were going at a log: tat-tat-tat-tat-tat…

The highschoolers headed to their bus stop stumble down the sidewalk in the snow that comes up their shins. A young fellow looks up and says, “thank you,” for the two blocks of sidewalk I cleared. Just one easy step before getting back into the snow makes a difference.

–

Weather in Canada makes for a pretty much inexhaustible supply of conversation material. I work in the front of a Chinese take-out restaurant, handing out Szechuan chicken and a multitude of “combo”s. I ask the elderly gentlemen how they’re enjoying the sunshine (although the wind is nasty today, eh?) and five minutes later I’m asking the shift worker what they think of the snow that’s now falling.

The construction guys enter in large, noisy groups. Their bright orange reflective wear fills up the space between the counter and the door and I have a hard time hearing the person ordering. That’s how Darcy, biggest fellow of them all, ended up with an order under the name of “Dorothy”. His buddies won’t let him forget his new name for a while.

Once the crews have their lunches, it’s quieter. A dark-haired, slim woman comes in, clutches her order. “You’re not losing business because of the coronavirus, are you?” she asks. I shrug my shoulders, non-committal. It’s hard to tell if our slow days are due to the weather or the news. It bothers me that she’s the second customer this week to bring it up. The first wanted to know if our chicken was shipped from China. I thought he was joking.

“Chinatown, in Toronto, is losing business fast,” she continues. “There’s no need to be afraid. People don’t stop to think it through.”

I make some kind of response. She says: “People are stupid.” Thump goes her paper-bagged meal on the counter for emphasis.

–

Listen to the birds! my sister calls, but I already hear them: the thick whooshing of the wings of dozens of geese flying in formation. Last Fall I picked beans as the days changed and my fingers chilled. The geese would take off from a lake at the bottom of the field, rising just above my head. It is an unforgettable sound, all those powerful wings beating at once, just above you.

These geese, though, are out of place in February. Where are they headed to?

–

The snow is falling thick again, thick and pretty. It’s not a pretty image, I know, but it does look an awful lot like the sky is shaking out its dandruff. I shouldn’t say that here, because now you’ll never un-see that.

Littlest Sister and I are in the driveway. She is shifting her weight, complaining about the cold. Even with the cold, though, she can’t help taking in the beauty of it. I scrape the ice off the windshield. The latest snowfall is so fluffy, banging my car doors shakes it off.

We ease the cranky car onto white streets, with the white particles flying into the windshield, with a white sky ahead and white houses and trees on either side. We’re headed somewhere we almost never go: a take-out pizza place. It’s a visit justified by a coupon we found earlier.

We play Spot-It as we wait for our pizza, right up next to the glass windows where the snow still falls, thick. Two boys enter with their Dad. The younger one – six years old, maybe? – slips away from his Dad to stand an inch away from our table.  

“You know this game?” I ask.

He nods. “You want to play with us?”

Next moment his older brother is there (10?) and we start a new game, giving their Dad a thumbs-up across the place so he knows his kids are okay.

The boys are fast. They swap compliments and challenges faster than the cards. Their competition doesn’t extend to my sister and I. Kids will say so much, without even trying. They just let you know what’s on their mind. “We haven’t played this in so long… our game must still be in the boxes…you think it’s there still?”

“It’s a small game, easy to lose track of,” I offer.

“Those are St. Patrick’s clovers.”

“You ever find one of those?” I ask.

“Oh, lots! In our old home. We moved last September…”

So it continues, about five minutes of swapping cards and yelling before our pizza is ready. Maybe it’s because I moved so much as a kid, but I’m glad we were there tonight to play a game they still hadn’t unpacked after five months in a new house. It won’t ever be like their old home, but I still hope they’ll find four-leaf clovers in their new place come Summer.

We leave with our hot pizza and find the car needs to be brushed off, again.