Bet that’s where you want to be right now, huh?  Well, sadly, right now Calgary looks more like this:

Yeah.

Oh autumn, we hardly knew ye.  Well, it’s that time of year again, when the trees have all shed their foliage, the birds have abandoned their aeries and have taken refuge in tree cavities or have flown south, and when that white blanket has fallen upon the Earth like autumn’s burial.  Good news is, just like every year, after the initial shock has worn off, and after people have stopped crashing into signs, trees, and each other, life returns to normal.

I remember living in North Carolina, and every winter I would always look forward to the snowfall, because it was so light and fleeting, like the annual showing of Miracle on 34^th Street.  I’d look out my window and see the snowflakes floating down towards the ground, and it’d always be a huge rush to get outside and make a snowman, because very soon, the snow would always disappear.  We’d get a couple of inches of snow down there, and they’d call a snow day.  Now, for those of you who have never seen the film Snow Day or have never heard the term, a snow day is a cancellation of school, due to snowfall.  For a kid like me who looked forward to about a week’s worth of snow days every year, they were the two greatest words in the English language.  Hearing the news anchors announce snow days on TV as a kid was like a shot of awesome into my day.  The only problem was, of course, that the snow would always melt away the next day.

Then, I arrived in Canada, and my first winter was spent in Montreal.  I remember seeing the mountains of snow along the roads and thinking, “Whoa, I could make a whole city of snow men with this!”  But alas, never a snow day.  Then I came to Calgary, and again, no snow days.  I miss snow days.  I know Canadians are hard-nosed, thick-boned people who can trudge 15 miles through the snow to get to school, uphill both ways, but I believe it would do society, and our kids, a great justice if we began implementing snow days.  It would inevitably end up being a bad thing though as I know, because, well, there’s a lot of snowfall round these parts, but a man can dream, can’t he?

P.S. if you haven’t yet noticed, I am naming the titles of my posts after names of songs.  If you have noticed: nice!  For Willy’s gold-star stamp of approval, see if you can name the artists of the songs I’ve used so far.