Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not lamenting the milder winters we’ve been having and the less than frequent snowfalls – though I’m not thrilled about the existential threat global warming poses. But for those of us of a certain vintage, winters in Leaside used to be much snowier than they have been in recent years.
Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, winter, or rather snow, started in November, right about now. It started with overnight frost in the early days of the month, and then one morning we’d wake up to an eight-inch blanket of snow. That first snowfall was always very exciting. Well, it was exciting for my twin brother Tim and me. My parents never seemed quite as thrilled with the dawn of the snowy season as we were. In fact, there was often the adult version of moaning and complaining when the flakes started falling. We’d fetch the snow shovels from the basement where they’d been stored since that unexpected last-gasp April blizzard the previous spring. The half-full (always the optimist) bag of road salt would also make its way up from the furnace room ready to be scattered on our front walk.
The only part of the first snowfall we didn’t enjoy in our childhood was the return of the snowsuit. For some reason, our mother felt that wearing a snowsuit to school in Grade 4 was just fine when the rest of the world clearly understood that Grade 3 was the cutoff. The snow-suited kids in Grade 4 were mercilessly teased. But other than that, the first snowfall was cause for celebration. The walk to school took much longer as we’d of course have to navigate the huge snowbanks left by the big plows. And we didn’t always pursue the path of least resistance or honour the timeless axiom about the shortest distance between two points being a straight line. Plus, there were snowballs to throw.
But when we finally made it to the Bessborough school yard, other joyful distractions awaited. By the time we arrived in the schoolyard, the East York Board of Education workers had already cleared the paved portion of the yard creating a long snowbank not unlike the Himalayas just on the edge of the field. By the third snowfall, the mountain range was probably 10 ft. high, the perfect setting for a pitched battle with the Grade 5s and 6s. It was thrilling in the morning before class, it was thrilling during morning and afternoon recess, and it was still thrilling after school. It’s amazing there weren’t more injuries. We would claw our way up to the top of the mountain, well, snowbank, and tackle the older kids sending them, and often us, too, back to the bottom. While regrouping for another assault, we’d soften up our foes by hurling snowballs at them. All these years later, I still remember how much fun it was to play “capture the snowbank,” though I haven’t participated for the last several years now.
Snowball fights would slow us down on our walk home at the end of the school day but we never, ever, threw an errant snowball that missed its mark and instead happened to hit a slow-moving Eaton’s delivery truck. That never happened. Not once. When we’d finally make it home, if there was enough light left, we’d grab our toboggan and head for what we always called the double hill at Talbot Park just next to the football field. As I may have mentioned in an earlier column, years ago, just sliding down the hill on a toboggan was a little too tame for us. So, we’d bring along shovels and build a jump halfway down the hill. We liked to mix our tobogganing with a little flying.
The current state of our climate crisis promises future winters without the kind of seasonal snow accumulation I remember from my school years. Those were the days. But they’re also a reminder that we all have to get focused on doing our part to arrest rising temperatures or it may be more than snowfalls that become a thing of the past. Here’s hoping we’ll still have a few good tobogganing days this winter.
A two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, Terry Fallis grew up in Leaside and is the award-winning writer of nine national bestsellers. He’s busy working on his 10th novel, The Marionette.
