Slop

My wife is generally in a fair mood. She’s from the great white north, which I didn’t capitalize on purpose because even though it’s to our North, and even though it is indeed white more months than it is green, I don’t think it’s all that great. Since she hails from this northerly land, she is accustomed to snow and ice and temperatures that rarely warm above zero, Celsius, of course. I’ll never forget the first time I flew to visit her in her home town. I flew aboard a small regional jet, and when we landed at the airport I was surprised that the plane didn’t taxi to any sort of terminal. Instead, it just stopped on the runway somewhere, opened the door, and some steps were wheeled in place. It was as we had flown to a small exotic airport, except it was approximately 40 degrees below zero. Be it Fahrenheit or Celsius, it doesn’t matter much at that temperature.

My lungs stung with each cautious sip of that winter air. My eyes and my nose froze, and the wind whipped across the runway and our wheeled steps and I hurried through that misery to the airport, which was only moderately warmer. I had wondered what the story was behind this weather. Was it a 1000 year freeze that just so happened to occur during my initial visit? Was there something wrong with the jet stream? Had it pushed north to the pole and then directly south to Winnipeg, carrying with it all that cold and snow and so much wind? I asked these questions of my not-yet-bride, and it turned out that there was no special explanation for the extreme weather that day. It was just a Tuesday in January.

With this background, you know why it was a big deal this morning when she looked outside and said that she didn’t want to do this anymore. Do what? I asked. She said that she didn’t want to even look outside anymore. It was too white, too cold, too stark. The snow was too high, the air too cold, the sun too bright in its ineffective mockery of our plight. When a girl from Winnipeg proclaims winter to have been too much, you know it’s a serious charge.

There is some warmth in our forecast, but what we must do now is embrace the coming slop. Winter is fine, as long as it is real winter. White and fluffy snow is pretty, even if at this late date we find nothing pretty about even the prettiest of snowfalls. While fresh snow is nice, melting snow is anything but. Melting snow is messy snow, and it’s dirty and it’s filled with bits of trash that hid inside its forgiving mass for so many months. We must begin the task of ridding this snow from our views, and in the process, things are going to get really, really ugly. Piles of snow will shrink and brown, and we’ll be forced to drive through muddy puddles of ice and melt, and it’s not going to be fun. March is going to get ugly, hopefully in a hurry.

This is why March may be the best month ever to look at vacation homes here. If you can find your way to the lake on a March day, with this aforementioned browned slop everywhere, and you can find value in a home and deem the setting to be pleasing, well then just imagine how beautiful that home will look once it isn’t cast in this most unflattering light. If a home is acceptable when surrounded by mud and ice, just think of how it’s going to look when surrounded by the lush green of a summer that’s bound to come.