So you think this is cold?

   I grew up in Hamilton, Ontario which is not a city noted for its pleasant winters. In 2001, the city government closed both of its municipal ski hills (due to lack of snow and cold weather, not skiers or hills). We got buried, (as we still do once or twice each year) with lake effect storms blowing east off of Lake Ontario, which effect little of the rest of Southern Ontario. I remember, as a teenager, wondering why anybody could like the winter since all it meant, for me anyway, was wet feet.

     I moved to Montréal and still remember the first winter storm I experienced there. The wind was blowing and the snow was falling and I had decided to walk down to the nearest dépanneur and buy beer. I bundled up in my warmest winter things and set out on foot. It didn't take me long to realize that this was far more inclement weather than I had ever experienced. It was only about 1 kilometre, 15 minutes on foot, to the store but by the time I returned to my apartment the fronts of my legs were blue.

      I lived in a third floor apartment at the front of the building on a main street. I was awakened in the middle of the night to the unmistakable sound of heavy machinery. I pulled the curtains aside and, and to my amazement, was treated to the spectacle of a large snow-blower loading snow, (already pushed to the side of the road by three snow-plows, graders really) loading the snow into a long queue of dump-trucks. I learned later, that the trucks would then dump the snow into the St. Lawrence down by the Victoria Bridge. If they didn't truck it away it would still have been there in April, since Montréal doesn't get winter thaws like the ones I'd grow up with (the ones which give you wet feet!)

     I've since felt -40 degree cold in Amos, in Abitibi, a day so cold in Thomson Manitoba that we just stayed indoors, and a horrifying afternoon walking up Portage Avenue in Winnipeg in February. It was so cold and windy that we went in the east doors of departments stores and out the west ones to avoid walking on the street. That was the coldest I've ever felt in my life.

     Years later I was listening to a colleague whinge that it was too cold to do playground duty.
 "This isn't cold," I told her. "I lived for three years in Montréal, it really gets cold there."

Her reply? "I lived for the first eleven years of my life in Nigeria. This is cold!"

     I take her point.