Winter

As we drift through winter here, which is mild, but feels ridiculously cold for reasons I've stated on multiple occasions on this blog (NO CENTRAL HEATING, OR HEATING OF ANY SORT IN MANY PLACES!), I've been thinking about winter at home, in Saskatchewan, about how cold it is and how I ever endured it. A few years ago I came home from Victoria for Christmas and visited my grandma in the nursing home where she now lives. She was 82 at the time, and when I complained about how cold it was that day, and how cold I was, she turned to me and said "Don't tell me you're turning into a wimp out on the west coast, Kate." It was meant to be taken lightly, I think, but served also as a sort of warning to me. Something like "Don't get too comfortable on Vancouver Island and forget where you come from." I talked to my mom the other day, and she said it was around -30 last weekend, but that was an improvement over the week before when it was -40. At the moment, I can't even imagine how cold that is, although most of the winters of my life I've spent in such weather. It's strange how when we're not experiencing something right now! right this moment! we can't comprehend it. Take the heat here, in the summer, for instance. It is phenomenal. But now that it's winter, and cold (in its own way...) I can't imagine how hot it was, how hot it will be.

I've been thinking about "home" a lot lately, and how much I want to find one. The question of home is a complicated one, and I feel torn on many grounds. Here is a link to Courtney Milne's (a photographer from Saskatchewan I like a lot) website. Incidentally, I just started reading one of Sharon Butala's books called "Wild Stone Heart." It seems sad and ironic that it's when we're far from home that we sometimes learn the most about it, and long the most for it.

I liked this quote:

"It is time all of us who know about the profound beauty and hope, about a kind of salvation that is to be found in nature, joined together --both mystics and pragmatists-- with a new land ethic designed to achieve a way of life that recognizes our kinship with the rest of nature, that recognizes, at last, that wilderness is the source of our human-ness and that without a vibrant and living natural planet, we cannot survive."
- Sharon Butala