Meditations on a Snowy Day

It’s easy for us city-dwellers to dislike winter. Its slowing influence inconveniences our urban lives, which demand speed. We city folk want to get places, and winter tells us not to. Winter in a city like Toronto means gridlocked traffic, delays, wetness, and slush – on our boots, in hallways, subways, and in every corner. When winter’s natural white mixes with urban modernity, it turns grey. And in the city, the grey of winter is something to be endured, and overcome.

At least, most of the time. Sometimes, like this past weekend, winter appears with such conviction that it cannot be bent to the urban will. In big storms, we are forced to abandon our usual fast-paced city lives, if only briefly, to exist with and in winter. To most, this is a clear inconvenience: meetings get cancelled, appointments re-scheduled, shoppings postponed, and tax dollars spent. Though I understand this perspective, I think there’s another, too, which we can easily miss: the invitations winter can offer us.

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to glimpse them.

As the snow fell last Sunday, I was taken back to my childhood. Growing up in Toronto, snowbanks in our neighborhood used to accumulate from December onwards, often becoming taller than I was, before melting in the spring. Though I’m only in my early twenties, the change from then to now is palpable: we don’t really get such winters – real winters – in Toronto anymore, it seems. This time last year, lawns in our neighbourhood were entirely green. So, when real winter returned to greet us, last Sunday, nostalgia alone compelled me to greet it. In the afternoon, I laced up my boots, dawned my toque, and set out for our local park on foot. My route crossed a few roads, where cars struggled in the conditions, and it became evident that walking was the faster method of transportation, during the so-called ‘bad’ weather.

Arriving at the park, I trudged atop the toboggan hill, where the pristine white snow completely submerged my feet – in Toronto, in 2025! Truth be told, the only indication I was still in Toronto, and not Algonquin, was a grime-covered TTC bus visible on the road at the park’s edge, slowly making its way.

More amazing than the depth of the snow, was the depth of life on the hill: it was filled with families, young kids, teens, and even some adults, toboggining, skiing, snowboarding, and just playing in the snow. Kids laughed as their friends went over make-shift jumps, absolutely wiping out at the bottom. As they should have. A husband filmed his wife flip sideways on their family’s sled. As he should have. A man appeared with a carton of hot chocolate, and served a group of his kids and their friends out of cardboard cups – some of whom then proceeded to spill it all over their mittens. As they must have. There’s an expression for the kind of classic splendor I witnessed last Sunday afternoon, on that hill: “you love to see it”.

If winter means inconvenience and annoyance throughout the rest of the city, it didn’t there and then. The fun, festivities, and friendships that I witnessed unfold were not only winterous in origin, but in substance, too; they were, in many ways, of the storm. Every urban plan that winter had cancelled on that hill, so to had it replaced with a different, snowier one. It was apparent to me then how winter’s reputation as a force of absolute impediment is not reflective of its reality, but of ours: winter is a force of possibility, that invites us to take up new ways of living and being in its arms. It is only in dogmatically refusing winter’s invitations – when doing so is technologically possible – that urban ideology can make winter into something to be overcome.

But what would happen if we prioritized overcoming this ideology, instead of winter? If we attuned ourselves more closely to winter’s invitations? The result, I think, would be life more fully lived.

For instance, traversing the toboggan hill’s crest, three joyous kids laughingly asked if I wanted to take a run on their saucer. Their cheeks were rosy. As they should have been. Though I politely declined, they nevertheless began explaining the best techniques for achieving maximum speed, complete with demonstrations. I later realized, while walking home, that brief conversion was the first time in months I’d spoken to a kid. It might be surprising to some, but I’m never really in positions to, as a young adult in the city without young family members, kids of my own, or work that involves children outside of summer canoe tripping. And lacking such contingent obligations, my city life never asks, let alone demands, that I interact with children. But it should, because kids are integral to community.

Despite its reputation as an ‘isolating’ season, it was winter that finally invited me to partake in vital intergenerational interaction, if only briefly, on that hill. And in so doing, winter not only cancelled my normal urban plans for the day, but invited me to replace them with ones I desperately need, but desperately lack, because of my city life.

And that, I think, is the power of taking the invitations of a snowy day more seriously: the possibility of finding a more awakened life in the midst of winter’s slumber.