In Celsius

Once I was describing my dad’s height to a friend. “Six foot three inches,” I said. And added without thinking, “I don’t know what that is in Celsius.” The friend laughed, and I was surprised and pleased by my own joke.

This was going to be a post making fun of Canadians because I just passed the five year anniversary of moving here, i.e., our wedding, honeymoon, etc. But I gave up. It is very hard to make fun of something that one is becoming and liking better all the time, and also mocking cultural differences is easy to do. Anyone can if they try. And it’s not even very useful. So many of the things that people make fun of Canadians for most folks know about already, and it is so last year. I would never want to be last year. 

I find that it is difficult to know exactly what is what as far as cultural differences go. I’ve only ever lived in one American spot, and my Canadian experience is limited to Bancroft. It is hard for me to narrow down the differences between Canada and the States when I don’t always know if they are Canadian or Ontarian or Bancroftian or Hillview-ian, our church here, or just plain Burkholder and vice versa. So we are going to be kind to Canadians. 

August is always such a reminiscent month for me, what my father-in-law likes to call “déjà vu all over again”. There is a peculiar damp earthy smell in our basement this time of year that is not good housekeeping to acknowledge and always one of those things that I hope people don’t know what I’m referring to when I do mention it. “A smell in your basement? Never thought of it.”

I think if I was what I should be I would be scrubbing all the surfaces to prevent mold. (I don’t know that there is mold, and I sincerely hope that if there is, I don’t find it. Mold sounds like an awful lot of work.) All the same, I secretly like the smell of our basement. It brings back many memories of the early days of our married life and invokes that old timeless feeling that I have encountered off and on all my life.

I used to get this feeling as a child when we were sitting down to eat breakfast with my family, a knot of feeling down in the pit of my stomach, in what the psalm calls the lowest parts of the earth. It would spread up into my throat and nauseate me. The preciousness of the moment would choke me with a visceral sensation that I can only hope you have experienced too, or you will never figure out what I am talking about just from this description. 

I don’t think as a child I would have realized that the moment was precious. It was too normal to strike me as precious, and usually it was so mixed with morning breath and crying siblings and the same old scrambled eggs and Dad squinting at the Sunday school quarterly to see what the daily devotional reading might be while Mom hollered for kith and kin to get themselves to the table for once and for all that I’m not actually sure I knew it was precious at all.

It was a homesick feeling, I think. I felt the pressure( and here I run the risk of taking on too big a thing to describe; I may lose both my audience and myself) of the connectedness of all time, that the moment five years ago and the moment now and a moment in fifty years from now have this in common– that it is now, and I am in it.

When I have this sensation, I always feel as though I would not be surprised to suddenly find that I am back or forward about twelve years in time. The older I get the stronger it is and the more disturbing it is, and August in Bancroft and the call of the loons off the lake in the morning as well as the smell of our basement are a few of the things that bring it on. 

I have rejoiced in this August like I never have before. It truly is a beautiful month, the best parts of summer and fall combined, but you might have to live in a northern lake country to know that. So points for Canada here.

I sat on my in-law’s deck the other night, and in the haphazard manner with which we conduct family conversation, I said in the middle of two or three other points of discussion, “Oh, isn’t it a nice evening!” 

Then, experiencing compunctions, I said, “Does anyone notice that I now comment on the nice day too?” They had. They seemed to feel some sort of vindication because I did use to make an awful lot of fun of them for this. 

Well, it was surprising. When I moved here, I was startled over and over by how enthusiastically locals entered into the weather. 

“Ho,” they would say. (I can’t transliterate this sound very well, but think garden implements in Canadian vowels.) “It’s a nice day. Oh, this weather…!”

And again a minute later. “Oh! It’s nice out today.”

I thought, previous to living in Canada, that Canadians must be immune to weather because they live with so many extremes. I thought they faced cold unflinchingly, welcomed the snow, didn’t notice bugs, were impervious to wind, indifferent to clouds and rain, swallowed smoky air like milk, and viewed heat as a pleasant change. Instead, apparently, the only happy weather is seventy degrees (I still am more comfortable with Fahrenheit, also known as Frackenheit in Charles’s family), sunny, and no wind. Definitely no wind. A breeze can ruin a picnic faster than rain around here.

“Why?” I would say. “Why? What’s the big deal about the nice weather?”

“Just you wait,” they would say. “Wait till it’s February and twenty below.” Somehow we always switch to Celsius when we talk about cold.

But I liked the snow and the cold. It was much nicer, I thought, than dreary, moody Pennsylvania winters. It was lovely to burn huge piles of firewood and snuggle up with books and go skating all winter long and have long coffees with people.

That is another thing– coffees. This has become so normal to me that it feels almost odd to mention it, but if I remember correctly in my childhood, coffee was black liquid in a cup, an uncountable noun. Here “a coffee” is just as likely to mean a visit in which we drink something, probably coffee. This is a great winter day or summer evening pass-time. Many, many weeks of the year, sometimes two or more times a week, a friend comes over or I stop in somewhere for a coffee.

Coffee is the principle drink at a coffee. You should offer this first when someone comes. Coffee is served with cream– real cream not creamer, thank you very much. Or you might have something else if you are watching your caffeine. You say, what about people who don’t like coffee? Do they exist?

Do we work at all in between all these coffees? Of course. Why should you ask? But here, we’re against workaholics as a principle. Loosely, according to local standards, a workaholic is someone who starts work before seven, excepting truckers and nurses, and doesn’t come home by five thirty, also excepting truckers and nurses. Apologies to you workaholics.

Also for you linguists, coffee is a countable object here. A coffee. Not would you like some coffee or a cup of coffee, but would you like a coffee? That is just one piece of vocabulary I had to adjust to. I had to learn about other foods: butter tarts and chelsea buns and beaver tails and poutines– and schnitzels for some reason. There are tills and gas bars and abattoirs and looneys and tooneys and serviettes and toques and quads and washrooms and queues. You write tests and people drive a buck fifty or a hundred clicks and say no worries about everything. Humans have bums. There is hydro to make your coffee perk work. It’s the garbage, not the trash, pop, not soda, and Smarties are little plastic chocolate candies that I could live without.  It’s very fun. All of it.

Where was I? Oh, yes, August. August is nice. We are not over specific with our adjectives here. Nice will suffice. If you want to know more, come see it.  

I still enjoy the northern winters, but probably the thing that has shifted me into the comment-about-the-beautiful-day camp is having children. Children make staying indoors less cozy and more chaotic, and I’m already wondering what I’m going to do with my toddlers this winter when the drifts are big enough to swallow them. It’s very hard to play in that quantity of snow when you are still a Very Small Person.

The winter evening feeling of a young household when the skeletons of supper are still strewn over the table and baths are being drawn while the parents kick the ubiquitous toys out of their path, clutching hyper children is also timeless, one of the less inspiring déjà vu sensations. At those times, I feel as though I never left my childhood, only reincarnated into my mom, and the great cycle of life feels more like a trap than a thing of beauty.

So I rave about the nice summer weather and accept the stigma. I can do Canadian.