Falling Back

It’s that time of year again. Saturday night we got our extra hour, and now it’ll be dark before afternoon’s even had a chance to take hold.

In the place I call home, at the corner of the Canada/US border and the Pacific Ocean (well, the Straight of Georgia if you’re being picky), we’ve begun the few months that can stretch our inner resources to the limit.

Sure, much of the rest of Canada has a well-deserved reputation for hard winters. They laugh at us when we get any real amount of snow because we’re ill-equipped to deal with it here individually, where many of us have all-season tires on our cars all year round, and municipally, where we have too few plows and sand trucks to deal with “real” winter. That’s okay. We get our own back on Valentine’s Day, when the flower count in Victoria always numbers in the millions while a lot of the country is still buried under dirt-crusted white stuff.

But in the meantime, a West Coast winter has its own challenge: rain. It doesn’t sound like much on the surface, but you’d be surprised. I have friends who’ve had to move away because of it and others who rely heavily on prescription lamps and mid-winter trips to sunnier climes.

It’s not the rain itself that’s the problem. The rain can be pretty, and it sounds lovely against the roof snuggled in at home on cold winter evenings with stew bubbling on the stove.

But with the rain comes the grey, oppressive clouds. They settle over the city for days at a time so that it never gets truly light out before the sun goes down and it’s dark again. It can be tiring and dreary and depressing. Yet most of us love it here, and not just in the summer. Why? Because no matter how wet and dark it gets, every once in awhile, we wake up to a day where the sky looks like it did yesterday:

The sun shines from beyond that expanse of blue, and it turns out that rain polished everything up so it’s all green and clean and lovely in the sunlight. And in just a few short months, it’ll be time for this again: