Past, present, and future winters

January 9, 2025

Multiple mornings in the past few days, there’s been a swirl of sparkly snow in the air, like a snow globe effect. As I write, there is blue sky and gauzy clouds overhead. Is the snow falling from those clouds? Or is it being lifted off the ground, carried, and swirled by the wind to other places? I can't tell. It’s pretty, though.

As for snow on the ground, we only have a skiff, a light dusting.

On this side of Christmas, we are now in winter. My childhood and early adulthood were lived in Central Alberta, where cold temperatures and snow, effectively winter, arrived well before Christmas. But for most of my adult life, I’ve lived in places where wintery conditions arrive in earnest mid to late December, and winter’s first full month is January.

And now here we are, January and winter.

A couple of years ago, sometime after we decided to move here, my dad sent me a text very near this exact day of the month. He was telling me how warm the day was. He may even have been in a T-shirt. The details are a little fuzzy to me now.

My dad does not appreciate winter—snow and cold—like I do. Unlike me, he doesn’t have a cushy desk job but works to build homes that shield humans from the elements. He has lived more than his share of days working in inclement weather, and I understand the reason for his preferences.

He was excited about how warm it was that day. He happened to be working outside, and the warm temperatures made his efforts much more enjoyable. In that, I was happy for him.

But I did not receive that text in the spirit it was sent, i.e., "Isn't this great?" I replied as much. I think I said something about warm weather in January making me feel sad and how such messages did not build a sense of anticipation for my move here.

As someone who loves a season of snow to play in and cold temperatures that force you to bundle up outdoors, I did not share my dad's enthusiasm for a warm day in January.

The message was received, and future winter weather photos and texts highlighted the intermittent snowfalls instead.

I have long been aware that moving to the South Shore of Nova Scotia would mean losing winter, as I have come to know and love it living in Quebec.

I’ve documented plenty of how living in Quebec ignited my own passion for winter culture and winter seasonality.

In fact, my love for winter and especially the mountains in winter (and Damien's similar affections) caused me/us to hold the possibility of living in Nova Scotia at arm's length for many years.

We wanted to live near ski hills and snowy mountainous trails. We didn't want to live in a place without mountains and without a full-blown eastern snowy winter.

I have had so many amazing experiences in the snow—alpine skiing (backcountry and front country), cross-country skiing (backcountry and front country), and snowshoeing—doing all of these things en route to cabins in the woods where you warm up for an hour or stay for the night.

These experiences have been some of the most magical in my life. Trekking through snow-laden trees on metres of snow accumulation, I felt very strongly that I never wanted to live somewhere where this kind of activity wasn't readily available to me.

My snow adventures during winter, speaking here specifically of going to places that are not well travelled and take some effort getting to, have been times of spectacular beauty and spiritual resonance.

The combination of physical exertion with wonder, awe, and a sense of Divine presence or immanence is an intoxicating alchemy. It's no wonder my brain was rewired to want more.

And yet now, here I am, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, where it doesn't get very cold by Canadian standards, and the snowfall is light.

Not all of the Maritimes are like this. The Cape Breton Highlands and New Brunswick can be very snowy, but the long-term trajectory in these regions, as for all of Canada, is warming winters.

I am not from here, so I don't have childhood memories of winters in Nova Scotia, but the born and raised Nova Scotians remember colder and snowier times. Of course, the data confirms this.

Owing to its location on the Atlantic Ocean, the warming of Nova Scotia winters has been more pronounced than other regions with the loss of a full week of winter over the last decade.

The change in Canadian winters deeply saddens me. In addition to my climate change grief, I've chosen to move to a place where winter is less cold and snowy than what I've grown to love.

The snowfall we experienced before Christmas was an anomaly. Statistically, we are unlikely to have an experience like that again for many years. For some younger Nova Scotians this was their first white Christmas.

I have been thinking about all of this as we’ve entered winter.

I’ve been thinking about my love for winter, especially participating in outdoor winter sports. I've been thinking about the warming climate and how it shortens Canadian winters and makes them more rainy than snowy, particularly in the east.

I've been thinking about how moving here was my choice, how much I love this place, and how I have also committed to making it my home for the long term, or at least until the end of my parents' lives. (And yes, it’s weird to talk about that, but it’s just the truth.)

For context, in case you're new here, my husband and I moved around during our child-rearing years in the pursuit of various life experiences and opportunities, including living at a ski hill for 18 months.

We were open to experimenting with where we lived in order to achieve certain goals for our lives.

In this move, we have committed to staying here into my parents' old age, which, God willing, is years away. We hope it will be a long time, and we are planning for this to be the house and province where we will have lived the longest. So far, our record is 13 years in Quebec, with 9 of those in our Montreal apartment. Maybe we'll live here till the end of our own earthly lives?

All of that to say this: I have moved to a place where winters do not have the conditions I have come to expect and appreciate. And I will be here for a long time.

We’ve been here almost seven months and I absolutely love it. I love my home. I love being close to my parents after 24 years of living far apart from each other.

Living a values-aligned life is about more than the weather conditions.

In mentally and emotionally preparing to move here, I promised myself I could travel to more wintery places during winter.

Our work is location-independent; we could rent a place for a couple of weeks or a month on the Gaspé peninsula (the best wintery place we've lived) or in New Brunswick. From that "home base," we could theoretically cross-country ski and snowshoe to our heart's content.

I entertained those ideas in the early days of the decision-making process to move here when I was trying to reconcile that I would be leaving the kind of winters I had grown to love to move to a place without such winters.

Now I’m not so sure those measures will be necessary.

We change. Our needs change. Our desires change.

It’s very possible that my years of loving and living a snowy winter were for a particular season of my adult life, not the entirety of my adult life.

My sense of contentment, grounding, and satisfaction in living here has been significant. Moving here has resolved the decades-long quest in my life to find home. This will make it easier to adapt to the winters here.

We may travel to enjoy winter activities. But those activities have already changed for us. Damien sold his snowboard a couple of years ago, and we haven't been downhill skiing for as many seasons now.

We might never return to that activity, at least as something we pursue frequently. We still dream of taking a ski vacation out west, where the good skiing is, but maybe we’ll be so rusty and out of practice that the risk of injury wouldn’t be worth the thrills.

Who knows what the future holds?

This winter, I am committed to finishing my Masters degree. This means two days a week of writing, three of working, one for home management/making, and God willing, one for rest. I will have no time for winter travel or adventures. We will be staying around home, experiencing a South Shore winter.