Is snow just snow?

Not for the meteorologist, who has various ways to describe the white stuff. Inuit supposedly have over 100 words to describe snow, but the linguists have confirmed 27.

As we write this evening in our writer’s circle, the city in fact the majority of the province has been involved as the meteorologists put it “ severe winter storm warning” as far as I am concerned it just means snow and more snow, coming down, blowing side ways, drifting filling in my driveway, sidewalks, porches and railings. Spots melt around the blue and white Christmas lights and coating the white wire deer, bent eating the wrapped bunch of herbs, more realistic in the dusting of snow than the barren decoration I set out two weeks ago.

Snowed and snow drifts that fill and invade those spaces of neighbourhood sidewalks, urban freeways and back lanes and that we continually battle with shovels, snow shovels, plows, snow plows and blowers, snow blowers, all made devices to battle and conquer the simple white snow flurry. Why the battle and why cannot we slow down and allow ourselves to be snowed in and enjoy the silence and muffling of the world around us. Walking crunch, crunch the sound of boots on freshly fallen snow either a pleasure or spine tingle like the chalk scraped on the blackboard; snow laden branches of spruce and real dripping icicles, not the tinsel with which we laden our Christmas trees and black capped chickadees foraging beneath; clumps of snow white against the dark of the still running creek in the ravine; ice pans circular crystalline slowly coagulating into o larger masses, the precursors to the still frozen North Saskatchewan river:

When I work in Nunavut we have “ snow days": a blizzard, a white out, snow blowing sideways, basically if one can not see the school or hamlet office across the street or uptown across the gully in Gjoa Haven, a snow day is declared and government offices and school are closed everyone locally “knows” that the snow is drifting but it has to be officially declared by four govt departments before closure. My Inuit friends will tell me how a blizzard is coming, the temperatures rising from minus 30oC to a balmy 10- 15 oC below and in the warmth there is a lull, a calm in which large flakes scatter through the night and almost Christmas like in March.

Slow down walk, ski, run, hibernate, that white stuff whatever we call it can be a blessing if we let it be!