First Snow (of many)

Sure helps the Christmas spirit. 

It snowed overnight on Wednesday and my daughter and I were excited to walk to school on Thursday morning through a new winter wonderland. It was the same walk to school as always, but everything looked delightfully different under a layer of fresh snow.

My daughter’s favorite was the snow on the ground (which she wanted to stomp through in her boots) and the snow on the cars (which she wanted to brush off with her gloves and pack into snowballs). My favorite was the snow in the trees; I admired how each and every leafless branch and twig was delicately decorated with snow like icing dripped atop a cake.

The snowplows had already cleared the roads, starting during the night as the snow was falling (the scraping noise of plow against pavement woke me in my sleep). Montréal is North America’s snowiest city, averaging 82.5 inches (210 centimeters) of snow per year. The city has one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated snow removal systems – it spends nearly CAD$200 million per year to remove snow from its 10,000 kilometers of streets.

On the walk to school, we had to dodge the sidewalk plows, which are like a toy version of plowing trucks, and indeed they are operated with the mania of a toddler taking its new toy out for a joy ride. I am not complaining, because they are effective and efficient in clearing the sidewalk for pedestrians like me, but they are so efficient that you have to watch out for being run over by one barreling along the sidewalk. They reminded me of Pac Man, speeding up and down the lines of the streets, gobbling up all the snow.