A Perfunctory Ode to Winter

I mean, it's not great. But it's also not so bad.

A Perfunctory Ode to Winter

I mean, it’s not great. But it’s also not so bad.

We’ve had not one, but two major snowstorms in Toronto this winter, each resulting in a snow day. For my non-Canadian readers, a snow day is when so much snow has been dumped on a place or region, that its citizens collectively shrug, decide all non-essential operations are off the table, and get to shoveling their driveways. Or, in my case, as a renter and apartment dweller, get to watching people shovel their driveways. I have grown to like snow days, and winter more generally. And no, it’s not just because I enjoy watching Toronto home-owners shovel from my vantage point.

Snow in a city is especially soothing. While in more natural venues the sparkling flakes highlight the beauty that already is, in cities they transform, enveloping the hard, gray edges of steel, glass, and winter, and burrowing into the most creative places, muffling sound and changing the rules of everyday life. The first snowfall this past December rendered the sidewalk impossible to navigate, so Natto and I ventured onto the streets, whose quota of snow had been significantly squashed down by brave drivers. There, I converged with an elderly man walking his cocker spaniel, and we chatted about our dogs’ disposition towards the starchy stuff surrounding us and paused to observe a toddler stuck in chest-deep snow, waving its arms for mother’s rescue. We parted ways after reaching a stop sign, each continuing our vaguely anarchist walk towards our respective homes.

My attitude towards ice and snow and grey and cold was not always so contemplative. Canadian winter, as it turns out, is a bit of an acquired taste. I grew up in Buenos Aires, where any number of degrees below zero was understood as unspeakable cold. My grandmother would reminisce about the infamous minus twelve day (to be clear, she had not actually experienced it, she’d just heard about it). I was regularly warned about golpes de frío, shocking drops in temperature that could strike any part of my uncovered body, but especially the throat and the head. As a result of this robust socialization against all things cold, I was hesitant at best about Northern winter and, after a few obligatory instances of “Latina marvels at snow,” I grew disillusioned with the dark, seemingly endless season, and mostly waited for it to end the second it arrived.

It is likely that my lack of interest in winter activities exacerbated the issue. My brother and I had to swear off sledding down the library hill after plowing through a group of fellow children like bowling pins. One can only freeze at a sugar shack so many times and doing word searches featuring Bonhomme Carnaval in French class got old pretty fast. I have a remote memory of indulging my friend Shiloh by trying snowboarding once, only to be impossibly sore for weeks after, and an even vaguer one of sitting helplessly on a hill as a teenager, watching babies in snowsuits speed past me, stopping with their skis with a perfect lateral slide after I had failed to stop my downward momentum with a sloppy pizza slice formation. Not everything is for everyone, and I had accepted that winter, like fennel seed and paisley print, just weren’t for me.

I believe the slow shift in my attitude towards winter converged with bringing Natto home. Her excitement at the flurries of snow gathered in our old apartment was cautious at first, a sniff here or there. By the time we encountered it in larger quantities at the park, she was a full-blown addict. She dove in and out of snow piles, emerging with her face covered in powder, scoffing with the thrill of it all and shaking everything off to start all over. Where I was careful with my silly bipedalism she managed all terrain, her four legs and low center of gravity proving perfectly adept for icy pockets. We now have several choices of loops around the neighbourhood that maximize snow and ice, for the lady’s benefit. She especially loves running free at High Park with her soulmate Usher, the Dutch shepherd mix, while his owner Sam and I make a slapstick show of hanging on to each other for stability as we tumble down icy hills. Another mutually beneficial wintertime activity consists of me throwing a ball as far as I can into deep snowbanks, which Natto zooms after, effectively swimming through the stuff to get to her precious. This is deeply satisfying to us both, as she gets to be covered in snow, and I get an express ticket to a tired dog.

Of course, it’s not all effortless gliding across frozen ponds. The conundrum of how to best care for Natto’s paws is zero-sum game in which no matter my intentions, I am the villain. The salt sprinkled on the sidewalks, coupled with the freezing temperatures, leave her limping, extending her paws for me to dust off and clean, as many as twenty times per walk. The whole affair is pitiful: her crying, the impossibility of me cleaning her paw through my thick mittens, the inevitable removal of said mittens, and the horror of realizing I’ve wiped my face with same hand I’ve just used to clean dog paws. The options to prevent the self-inflicted tetanus or whatever it is that abounds on Toronto streets are limited and imperfect. There are small, balloon-like paw covers, which I secretly refer to as paw condoms. They, along with sturdier boots, seem to be repelled by Natto’s paws, and the walk turns into me picking up books off the ground, scrambling for a place to store them, and returning to the initial issue of cold, salty paws and its derivatives.

Because this winter has been particularly cold, and because Natto was appropriating poltergeist-like qualities due to her reduced walks, I had to take matters into my own hands. Some light research showed me that Canadian society is not only aware of this problem, it has come up with a solution. The answer to the winter walk conundrum exists in the shape of suspender boots. The contraption, as I found out at my nearby pet store, is pulled over the dog’s head and then each boot is adjusted via Velcro and a toggle. The effect is ridiculous, akin to assless chaps, but they’re effective. Effective at keeping Natto’s paws dry and warm. Less so at facilitating walks because, when in them, she refuses to move.

The first few walks in her assle—her new boots were fruitless. When we tried them out in the apartment, she stood bolted to the floor via nylon and Velcro, refusing to move. I know she was neither scared nor nervous because she still took cashews as a peace offering, something she would never do if genuinely fearful. No, this was a protest. I tried coaxing her to cross the room, one gloved paw at a time, to no avail. She stood, her dark eyes daring me to explain myself, until I gave up and carried her to the elevator. Once in the elevator, she became marginally more animated, released from her gorgon spell. It did still take us forty-five minutes to do a loop that usually takes ten, and neither one of us particularly enjoyed ourselves.

And so, I bring this essay to a rather unsatisfying conclusion. While I’ve grown to enjoy some aspects of winter—the dark mornings, the cozy dimension the apartment takes on by sheer virtue of being centrally heated, Natto emerging from piles of snow looking positively feral—other aspects remain the same. I still can’t say I enjoy descending into wet, slushy bowels of the Toronto transit system and risk slipping and tearing a ligament. The other day it took my friend Julia and I nearly forty minutes to find parking, which ended with my compact car stuck on a snow pile and the tires spinning without grip for several minutes before we were freed. Needless to say, we were very late for our psychic reading. Luckily, the psychic was on astral time and didn’t notice. Anyway, no, not perfect, but getting better.