Moody Greys

"One could be forgiven for thinking of suicide in the middle of winter in End City" is how I began a short story which turned out to be about a young homeless mother in a city that officially has no homelessness, and the impossible position that put her in--yet it takes no very great imagination to reword it slightly to be more personally applicable:

"One could be forgiven for thinking of suicide in the middle of the winter of 2007/08 in Toronto."*

Or anywhere in Canada, I've been told. I've heard tales even of knives or guns being pulled on snowplow drivers in Montreal when they pile the snow up at the base of a freshly shoveled driveway. It's been a terrible winter, weather-wise, for most of us; and it is impossible to tell how much of a persistent grey flannel mood might be attributed to the endless snow and cold.

There are the obvious logistical issues: the shoveling, the putting on of coats and boots and removing of coats and boots from self and progeny multiple times per day, the impossibility of the slightest errand, the condition of the roads and sidewalks. I've timed the boots-and-coats part and that alone adds thirty minutes at least to my day. Do you have any idea of how much easier life would be if I could just plunk my darling daughter in the stroller in her shirt and pants and wearing shoes, and just go? I long for that day and those stolen thirty minutes more than I remember ever having done in any previous winter.

But I wonder, too, how much the sheer weight of all that cold and snow drags us down. It has been several degrees colder than normal now for many weeks; the seasonal daytime high in Toronto this time of year is seven degrees above zero (celsius), and today we are getting two; on Friday, we will be two below. That's cold for January, let alone almost-April. And the snow--the infernal, ever-present, endless snow. One eventually comes to believe that Hell, to be truly Hellish, would need to freeze over, because nothing could be more lethal to the spirit than these vistas of dirty white stretching off in all directions as far as one can see. That I am currently inside and looking at a computer monitor does not appear to help. It is as if the physical weight of all that water-laden slushy snow is in a knapsack that I drag with me wherever I go, pulling on my shoulders.

Yes, I know we're all spoiled and over-privileged westerners; yes, I've read The Long Winter too, and I remember, with startling clarity this year, those scenes of privation and near-starvation in a small log cabin during a hard winter without all these modern bells and whistles. These snowplows, shovels, subways, heated shopping malls, boilers, cars, dvds and electric kettles that have been making this winter just barely tolerable. But as poverty is largely experienced through one's comparisons with the people one is nearest to, and not through comparisons with people starving in distant countries, so the experience of an awful season is compared, in the mind, with actual seasons one has actually lived through.

Even Frances feels it, telling me each morning as I wheel her stroller through the front door and we come face-to-face with the shoulder-high snowbanks in the courtyard, "I'm sick of snow."

"Me, too."

"I want spring. And summer! I want spring AND summer!"

"I'll take spring, for now."

"Is it going to be summer next week?"

"Probably not."

How do you delineate? How do you separate the separate effects of an already-challenging situation, the logistical issues of a hard season, and the emotional effects of the snow and the cold, on a grey flannel mood? How can you tell how much of it would simply evaporate were tomorrow to be sunny and ten-above? I tell myself that next week has to be better because it has to start getting warmer and the snow has to melt eventually, even if only in July. Meanwhile, my mind has taken on the colours of slush.

Posted by Andrea at March 25, 2008 9:44 AM under Single Momming

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