Another view of cold

My brother-in-law Bert and my sister Betty, in Vancouver for a respite from the Quebec winter, are amused by Vancouverites' complaints about the chilly weather. They're used to far worse than they encountered during a walk on Spanish Banks on Sunday. 

This was the disheartening sight out of my dining room window the day Betty and Bert arrived in Vancouver earlier this month. The pink viburnum blossoms were covered in snow. 

But Betty didn't bat an eye. She thought the sight of crocuses poking up through the snow was delightful. 

On Feb. 4, the day my sister Betty and her husband Bert arrived in Vancouver to escape the snow and cold of Quebec, it snowed here. “I apologize for the snow,” I wrote her that day. Although the snow quickly disappeared in a torrent of rain, people have been apologizing to them for Vancouver’s chilly weather ever since. “People say it’s cold; they say they hope it will warm up,” Betty laughed Sunday. “Hah! They don’t know what cold is!”

Betty and Bert do. Betty wears a cozy, loose indoor sweater that her daughter says looks like a great big hug and that she wants to inherit when the time comes. Betty and Bert carry photos on their cellphone of last winter’s snow that reached nearly the roof of a neighbour’s house. They wear wool socks and warm jackets with hoods that cover their ears.

Vancouver’s warm weather has always been a boasting point for residents, who like to send photos of early-blooming flowers and greenery to eastern relatives still buried under snowbanks. We don’t like it to let us down– hence the apologies.

But for Betty and Bert, it’s all relative. When she first arrived, Betty was delighted at the beauty of purple crocuses poking up through the snow of a white-blanketed garden. When we went for a walk on Sunday, she laughed at my suggestion that it was a bit nippy (the water had frozen in the birdbaths, always my measure for nippiness). “Look around,” she said. “It’s green; the lawns are all green.”

Blooming winter heather in the sunshine is exactly the kind of photo Vancouverites like to taunt their eastern relatives with in the depths of winter.

Or, hellebores blooming against a picturesque tree trunk.

Or, a very early rhodo.

Snowdrops in full bloom also remind easterners that their banks of white are still snow.

Well, yes, we did have a lot of rain this winter -- enough to create a little lake in the local park near me. In fact, one Vancouver website said on Feb. 6 that we had had 28 consecutive days of precipitation, making it the longest run of wet in more than 50 years.  January had only one moisture-free day, and 55 per cent more rain than usual. But these are things we don't usually include when we send our pretty-flower pictures east.