The way home

Desolate is the word visitors sometimes use to describe the winter landscape of Snowstorm Region. “I can’t imagine living here,” a friend once told me when she visited in January. In subzero weather, the trick is to search out pockets of warmth and colour to combat that seasonal desolation.

I spent the weekend doing just that. Friday night, I went to a movie with my husband, so that we could eat popcorn and drink lemonade, and imagine what it would be like to keep getting younger while everyone else is getting older.

Saturday morning, my friend Beautiful Hair picked me up, and we drove across glittering white hills to the small town where Gorgeous Eyes lives. In her cosy kitchen, we drank tea and ate spicy tomato soup and talked about our lives, while a yellow Tibetan prayer flag flapped in the icy wind outside the big glass doors.

Saturday afternoon, my husband and I went to the home of Monking Friend and Contagious Laugh to hang out with a dozen friends and play silly games in front of the fire. We came home in time to join the gang of young people at the house for a candle ceremony in honor of Shaggy Hair Boy’s eighteenth birthday. By candlelight and saberlight, we told stories about the freckled-faced little boy who has turned into a young man.

This morning, I brushed the snow off the car one more time, so that we could drive past red barns and white fields of corn stubble to get to the ski slopes. We spend the day snowboarding down the slopes in about a foot of fresh powder, and in between — eating french fries and hot sauce in the lodge.

It was a busy weekend, filled with friends and families, and the warmth of the fire. As we drove home from the ski slopes, the wind whipped snow across the fields and roads, a landscape of desolate beauty.