Winter Wonderland

This collage is an homage to my Canadian childhood winters. Maybe my children will experience such a winter in the future.



Even though we didn’t move to Montreal Canada until I was eight or nine, in the ensuing years we truly lived outdoors in the winter: building forts, snowmen, and igloos, tobogganing, skating, skiing, ice-boating, playing very poor street hockey, getting our tongues stuck on icicles, our toes frozen in wet boots, our legs numb by not wearing (fat) snow pants, and numerous other national winter activities. I have many wonderful memories of Canadian summers (sailing, sailing, and more sailing), but it is the winters I am most fond of.

Nomad Son is going off for two weeks with the rest of the 10th graders (over a hundred of them) to some ski resort in the Austrian Alps in a week’s time. We are frantically trying to work on the list of all stuff he needs. He’s been given a long list from the school. The problem is, that the list becomes longer and longer, once you start to read between the lines: e.g. enough food provisions for the journey down (19 and 1/2 hours). (Do you have any idea what a sixteen year old can consume in solids and liquids in a 24-hour period of time?)

The problem is that Luebeck lies near the Baltic Sea, and therefore the weather is of the damp, rainy, miserable weather so fondly associated with eighteenth century London, Oliver Twist or Sherlock Holmes, and Jack-the-Riper weather. We just do not do the minus 30 degree Celsius mountain weather of the Austrian Alps. Nomad Son has Nothing in his sparse winter wardrobe that could even remotely serve him in this adventure. For heaven’s sake, the only piece of clothing he might remotely find applicable is his new skater’s sweatshirt with a hood on it: unfortunately, the hood is a statement of style and not fur-lined.

No, no, I mustn’t lie, the situation is not as hopeless as I paint; he does have a large summer T-shirt and pair of shorts for the traditional Hawaiian fete for the last night of celebrations.

The rest is a disaster. He doesn’t even have two weeks of underwear. Does anyone have two weeks of underwear? And socks, and long johns, and shirts, and gawd, soooo much more! Is there any way he will survive this escapade?