So this is spring, Ontario

Driving the flat lands, the roads south of Lake Simcoe, the colours are flatter still. Washed out and insipid, weary and worn, the landscape stretches out before me.

I speed along poker straight roads, smudged in white and trimmed with a grey brown crust. The wind buffets the car seeking entry into my manufactured cocoon, a chink in my armour, access to my warmth, a way to reinforce the view before me and remind my senses of the bleakness that flashes by.

The bleakness of a land scoured. A panorama wrung dry of life. Picked clean of last year’s lustrous summer, divest of that autumnal treasure trove of reds and gold. Stripped even of the pristine white that is a Canadian winter.

So this is spring, Ontario.

Back in my homeland the summer is bright and warm, mostly. Autumn, winter and spring… they merge and morph from one to the next, a blur of blustery and windswept, damp and downright wet, chilly and brrrr cold. The snow falls but as quickly it is gone, the only real constant is the grey overhead. Sometimes leaden, sometimes plumped by stratocumulus, always a differing shade of monotone, pierced only briefly by watery shards of gold.

Back in England the grass at my feet keeps its green in winter. There’ll be no need to fire up the mower nor rouse the gardener but verdant blades still stretch skywards, drinking in what they can from the weak winter light. The shrubs, too, they hold a modicum of colour, a reminder of their summer pomp. And the trees… even the trees stripped bare of their leafy mantle retain a warmth, a colour in their branches boughs and bark that hints at the life hidden deep within.

But Canada. Your winter takes a heavier toll. Your snow carpeted then blanketed; an impenetrable shroud that descended silently and smothered the land. What beauty it brought. What a glistening immaculate cleansing. But in its wake, once liquefied and trickled back into that land, the snow leaves a barren scene.

So this is spring, Ontario.

Pressed hard into the earth, stripped of green, the grass lies withered. In the flat lands, field upon field, all look to me, dead. The conifers hang on to their sharpened leaves but not their healthy glow, the cold having stripped any thought of growth months ago. Maples, birch, basswood and alder, all stand naked and grey. Cold grey. Bent and bare, branches torn off by the weight of winter white. Beleaguered and embittered by the icy chill they stand waiting like deathly sentries for a changing of the guard.

As I drive nearer to home I see rocky outcrops dressed in static white waterfalls. Icicles drip where water is forced from the very granite shield on which life grips tenuously in this land in between. Like beautiful wounds, these fissures in rock leech the life source into salt spattered gullies.

Life looks bleak at the onset of an Ontario spring. But, in its deathly silence, in its bleached pallor there’s a beauty so subtle that those who don’t look and souls now immune will all but miss it. Look again at your harsh land, take stock of its bleak demeanour and marvel at these scenes that artists fail to paint. Look hard and remember what life will soon spring from this place so bitter, so unforgiving.

Smile Haliburton at your clouds of frigid breath, salt encrusted cars and slowly melting mountains of driveway grey. Take stock of the big land around you and learn again to enjoy nature’s palette of black, bone and grey.

For this is spring, Ontario.