springing forward etc etc

We seem to have survived our first winter-- hooray. Spring starts tomorrow, heralded by a 'supermoon'. (We just popped out to look at this 'supermoon' and find it almost indistinguishable from the 'moon'.)

Last week a Toronto local told me, knowledgeably, that she she could feel spring in the air. I just felt cold, but it turns out she was right. It's spring. There is ground everywhere. The local playground sports sand, not snow, beneath the swingset. My children now run out to play soccer on the nearby field, wearing tee-shirts and shorts. My own soccer team held its weekly practice outdoors this morning. That was a bit extreme, and I wore about 4 layers of clothing, but we all survived and even perhaps thrived a bit better for the chilly sunshine.

This past week schools have been having March Break. My friend and I took our combined 6 children to a 'sugar bush', a woods on the outskirts of the city where maple syrup is made. We followed the path downhill (a hill! a hill!) through the trees, looking at the taps in the maples dripping into galvanized buckets, tasting harvested sap, watching 'Granny Maple' stir the liquid in giant iron cauldrons over open fires, using 40 buckets of sap to make a single bucket of delicious syrup, the old-fashioned way. We sampled sap and syrup, and decided that the effort of boiling is definitely worth it. Further along the trail we saw the 'modern' method of syrup-making: very primitive-looking blue plastic tubes strung from the taps in the trees to larger black tubes that wobble through the woods, conveying the sweet liquid to the 'sugar shack', where a single, enormous vat is heated in order to transform sap to syrup. Somehow I think there must be an even more modern, more efficient way to do this, but maybe not. Syrup is awfully expensive; perhaps this is why. Afterward we all had pancakes with yet more syrup at the cafe. Yum yum yum, especially with sausages, and hot apple cider.

Last week was also St. Patrick's Day, whose North American significance I'd forgotten. It was a day of frolic and greenery: green beer, sidewalk parties where everyone wore sparkly green clothing, and wandering leprechauns. The kids and I saw it all as we walked to the dentist, to piano lessons, and home. In the UK, where Irishness is freighted with deeper ethnic and social meanings, celebrating this quintessential (or do I mean 'essential'?) Irish holiday has heavy political import, and is done, if at all, quietly. Here it's just another event on the frat boys' calendar. When I was a child if you didn't wear something green to school on March 17, you would get pinched. In the dire event that you forgot (woe is me), you would tell your classmates that you were wearing green underpants, and pray they didn't check your claim. Some children even dyed their hair green. (Ricky Branson did that in sixth grade. Many years later I heard he died of a heroin overdose.)

Another reminder today of how very nice Canadians are. We made a family outing to St. Lawrence Market, a Toronto site of which we had heard much but not yet experienced. It's a big indoor hall with lots of food stalls (meat, fish, produce, cheese, chocolates, 'condiments'), expensive knitwear, shea butter in 28 varieties, and food samples at every turning. Great fun. After some shopping we treated ourselves to a late lunch, sharing a table with a lone young man who, prior to our invasion of his spot, had been reading on a Kindle-like object. We struck up conversation and he proved very friendly, sitting with us throughout our meal, recommending restaurants and discussing bookshops. At the end, as we all packed up to leave, he said, shyly, 'Here, I'd like you to have this,' and gave us a packet of small, smoked elk sausages from one of the stalls in the market. Now, that would not have happened in England, methinks.

Cleaning house

The house is clean for the first time in six months. It took two people 10.5 hours to slog through all the muck, which is quite embarrassing. If I weren't so busy relishing the order and cleanliness, I'd be mortified.

Embracing the winter

When we first arrived in Toronto, seasoned Canadian residents advised us to 'embrace the winter'. Basically this seemed to mean that you must overcome your inner ursine and reject the urge to hibernate. Get out there and confront the white stuff, build snowmen, slide down hills, skate. So a few weeks ago, on 'Family Day' weekend (Canada's answer to the US 'President's Day', which says it all, really), we packed up kids, pillows, ice skates, sleds, snow gear, food, tea, and more kids, and headed north. Yes, further north. Nuts or what?

First we had to overcome the big thaw, which turned our snowy backyard into a lake, and denied us access to the garage unless we donned scuba gear. So loading the car was accomplished by dragging all the paraphernalia from the front door and along the sidewalk into a nearby parking lot.

Done. Get everyone in the car. Head north, reminding ourselves that we wanted to do this. Then, GPS notwithstanding, we made a wrong turn and launched ourselves the wrong way on the 401, which was enjoying bumper-to-bumper traffic and offered NO EXIT (help me, Sartre, help help me Sartre...) for 6 kilometers. The kids didn't mind as they were allowed to deploy the in-car video entertainment system. But after 30 minutes of stop-and-go driving, middle one declared his stomach was feeling a little .... yep, long story short, he upchucked. We threw him plastic bags but his aim and the bags' seals were imperfect. (That sentence construction involved a zeugma, if I'm not mistaken.) After 30 minutes of overpowering stench, we found an exit which promised a service station. It was certainly a station of sorts; in addition to all the usual facilities, the ladies' room featured an unsheathed hypodermic needle resting delicately on top of the toilet paper dispenser. Only sheer good luck saved me from being punctured by it. (Even more fortunately, daughter had accompanied father to men's room, so did not come near it.) Ever the good samaritan, I scooped it up in wodges of loo roll and tried to be discreet in bringing it to the attention of the staff. Discretion was not necessary, it turned out. 'Hey Mike! This lady's found another needle!' shouted the clerk to the manager. Mike brought me a rubbish bin and said, 'Just toss it in there. Thanks!' We're not looking for houses in that neighbourhood...

Onward and northward, through gradually diminishing traffic and accompanied by a persistant odour of vomit, it took us another two hours to reach the cabin in the picturesque Muskoka region. Actually at that stage we had to take the guidebook's word on the 'picturesque', as it was now not only dark but replete with alternately driving and swirling snow. By some measure of fortune and by judiciously ignoring the GPS in favor of the written word, we located our rented cottage on the shore of Clear Lake. (We never did see a lake, but there was certainly a large, flat, oblong, treeless white area in the vicinity.) 'Just pull your car up here,' the proprietor said, with typically proprietorial joviality. I backed up in the dark, with the car packed to the gills, and hit a tree. It didn't feel like much but in morning we realised that the poor car will never be the same again.

But you know what? After that harrowing journey, we had a fantastic time! We tried snow-tubing and cross-country skiing at a nearby provincial park. They loved us there. After park staff assured us that we couldn't get lost looking for the tubing hill, we a) did get lost, and b) when we found it, nearly pitched the car right down the chute. But once we got the hang of it we were hooked. It was such fun. Then back to the park headquarters to request cross-country ski gear. By then we had so endeared ourselves to the staff that they let us use the equipment for free for two hours. Later, the friendly lady at the desk confided that she had really admired my quashing, earlier, of a rude man who kept interrupting our transaction. 'I can't bear people like that,' she said to us. 'He was just trying to jew me down.' At our startled looks, she hastily corrected herself: 'That's not the right word.' No, it was not.

In the evenings we cooked lovely food, watched Back to the Future and Freaky Friday on the laptop, read books, and snuggled to sleep in the warm cabin. The next day we all completed some homework and then went out to a family downhill ski lesson. Everyone did brilliantly and the only one who got hurt was me, when I fell on my head getting out of the chairlift. Obvious thoughts arose, but I seem to have survived. Sobering, though. The kids were amazing, especially middle child, who had never skied before and yet was able to advance to proper chair lift runs after an hour of lessons. We all wanted more, which seemed a good time to go.

Homeward journey unremarkable. Just as it should be. I think, winter, we can consider you well and truly embraced. Now please go away and give us flowers. In England the daffodils must be blooming. Crocuses and snowdrops are long past...