Ages ago (holy cow, was that really a decade ago?), I spent a month or more, in springtime, working on and off in Montreal. A play I had written had been translated into Québécois and was running in a small theatre there, a production house that was a home to new writing, both Canadian and European.
I had a blast in that city. I loved it: the ironwork balconies hung with hot pink geraniums, the gracious streets, the bars and cafes, the casual, wry energy of the place, the apartment they’d given me over the Moroccan restaurant, with the jacuzzi bath and wooden floor. I wanted to stay in Montreal, to sink into her ether. I wanted to know those seductive streets.
Selective amnesia came easily to me. Soon I had entirely forgotten about the small children with the big demands who were back home with their father, scribbling on the table legs, regurgitating their fish fingers, giving their teddies a bath in the cistern.
l found that once again I had the energy to sit up long into the night, chain-drinking smoky Chardonnay and discussing such universally significant themes as exfoliation, rhinoplasty and the rejuvenating effects of spring after a long, cold bone-snapper of a winter.
You are an amateur, Montrealers told me, you’re a lightweight. You love the flowers cascading down from the pretty balconies. You love the sunlight breaking through the foliage when you totter down the narrow, dappled streets. You like to look up at the big pale-blue sky and close your eyes, feel the promise of heat. You have never wintered here; you know nothing. You wouldn’t last five sub-zero minutes.
Enforced isolation
I listened to their descriptions of muffled glacial life, of heated walkways underneath the city, of trekking from bed to office to mall to bed without really seeing daylight.
Yes, maybe they were exaggerating, but even if they weren’t, surely there’s a plus side to spells of numbing simplicity?
Certainly the Canadian writers I met seemed to benefit from their enforced seasonal isolation, too cold to do much more than warm up their fingers over the keyboards they worked on long and hard throughout the winter, confining their “research” to balmier months. There’s something comfortingly didactic about extreme weather, the ultimate excuse not to take your pyjamas off when there’s a “burr” in the month.
I was thinking about Montreal the other day after being woken by a stray blizzard, hailstones ricocheting off the bedroom window, the loose guttering groaning and bashing itself against the wall like a man in despair. I was wondering when, if ever, it would be spring.
“Good god,” said the bladder-full cat, “you want me to go out into that?”
Technicolour sky
A couple of bleary hours later and the egg-crack morning had changed her mind. I stood by the back door in something vaguely resembling sleepwear (a sad array of other people’s castoffs), a cup of coffee in my mitt, watching a technicolor sky unravel itself over the shivering suburbs. There was a mad extravagance about it for a Tuesday morning, pink and purple and minty blue and there, unmistakable under the cloudy bruises, summer yellow.
All day long on that beautiful spring day, the humans were looking unsure, fretful even. Do we get excited about this? Do we unbutton, unreel, unfurl? Do we acknowledge the change in temperature, the frivolity of the light? Do we start looking under the sink for the secateurs?
Such was the scent of summer about the day I was seriously considering booking a leg wax when lo and behold the sky turned to soup, it started to rain and then to snow, lightly at first but just enough to curb one’s enthusiasm, to put me firmly back in my winter box.
“Leg wax!” scoffed the cat. “Like that’s going to rock the world.”
Apparently people have weather personalities. I started reading about the subject and woke up an hour later, still chronically bored. It boils down to this; if you like the summer you are a summery person! If you like the winter you are a wintery person! Man, I am agog.
There was no category for people who experience the vicissitudes of climate on a hourly, nay, minute-to-minute basis. Nervy? Quixotic? Prone to hysterical laughing and weeping at the drop of a thermal hat?
Spring has sprung, you can tell by the crocuses and the spike in Windowlene sales.
Spring person or no (bouncy, bubbly, optimistic, with long and furry ears and libidinous intent) enjoy it. You may as well, the long-range forecast is for rain, sun, snow, sleet, mist, drought and delirium.