Harbingers

We are coming to the end of our first Canadian winter in a while, after spending the last five in Istanbul, and I have been noticing some local harbingers of a change in the season (the Istanbul list, like its winters, is different from this one). Here are some of the current (obviously Canadian, I think!) harbingers I've observed:

The blue road: I have always loved this phenomenon which occurs as the sun gets higher in the sky and begins to melt the dirty grey banks of snow and ice along the highway. If the slope is right the meltwater will cover the road, and on a bright day in late winter it can shine like a glorious blue trail to somewhere.

A bird: Song sparrow sings its territory from the top of a small tree.

Solar gain: You don’t revive, or start, the woodstove in the morning because warm sunlight is flooding in through the tall windows.

Walking the plank: We have some softening spots between the house and the car, because we haven’t finished our new walkway, and have to place a long 2x12 to walk across where the lawn is getting mushy.

Sunset: It’s later now, less need, though not less desire, for candles at supper.

Sunrise: The place where the sun first emerges has shifted from its farthest point south, between the two tall spruce trees in front of Deborah’s house up on the hill, which it reached on the solstice in December. Over the next few days you could see it start to work its gradual passage northward. Since then it has moved down the wooded slope and out onto the harbour horizon until it made it back over Thrumcap Shoal to the long low profile of McNab’s Island, so that it now catches the edge of my side of the bed as it shines in through the deck door.

A feeling: You feel like raking, cutting, pruning, clearing, tidying. You want to be able to dig where the garden used to be.

A surprise on Saturday night: The tiny solar-powered Christmas lights in the crabapple tree were bravely shining when we went out at 8. The small plastic collector had been buried in the snowbank from Dave’s plow since January and frozen in so hard you couldn’t even dig it out, but the snow receded enough and the sun got higher enough to surprise us.

Down by Andrew and Lisa’s: The tops of the birch trees show a definite colour, a reddish fuzz, against the blue of the harbour.

Driving with the window open: Only on occasion.

Wearing indoor shoes outside: Likewise.

Dripping: All along the dripline the constant sound of water from yesterday’s snow coming off the edge of the roof.