Winter's last gasp

We had 20 centimetres of snow in Vancouver on Friday, with winds reminding me of the prairie blizzards of my youth. Snow swooped in white sheets across the windows, and on the roads, there was the usual traffic mayhem. A young man in a snowtire-free BMW skidded down the hill on our street, bouncing off  our car and our neighbour's, damaging all three. The resulting insurance claims were among thousands reported for the afternoon.

 On Saturday, the temperature rose and the sun shone -- time for photos to record what we hope is the last snowfall of the winter.

John couldn't resist taking a photo of a big snowball -- the base of a huge never-completed snowman perhaps? -- in a nearby park. I wondered if it could also serve as a metaphor for the big, seemingly immovable essay that I'm working on.

Birdbath boy in my back yard looks a little annoyed to find himself up to his shoulders in snow -- again.

The pillow of snow on the other birdbath gives a sense of the amount that fell on Friday.

My poor winter pansies look defeated under their snow layer. Every time they've tried to bloom this winter, they've been hit by severe cold, floods of rain or a blast of snow. Luckily, they usually recover and bloom well into the spring.

Oh snow!

On Saturday, I was noticing how many people have crocuses growing like wildflowers all over their front lawns, and wondered whether I should try the same thing. On my walk the same day, I saw a row of perfect -- too perfect -- daffodils lining a neighbour's front walk. Did she buy them in full bloom and plant them ready-made, avoiding the drudgery of digging in bulbs last fall?

On Sunday, all spring-like observations and questions were buried under a thick blanket of snow that melted and froze and sat like rocks on my hedges and trees. Our big chill is expected to last a week or so; I look forward to resuming my spring musings.

Now that we have bylaws that residential sidewalks must be cleared by 10 a.m., John knows what his first job is after breakfast.

Snow-capped birdfeeder in the back yard. The birds won't stick around if I get too close, so I can't show how many made use of it this snowy day. At times, the food cylinder in the centre was covered with birds.

The ice and snow melted off the suet container when the sun came out later in the day. Sometimes so many birds were perched on it that it turned into a feathered ball.

My shady garden is always late, but the earliest daphne bush near the bird bath had started to push out some blooms last week, and somewhere along the hedge buds were appearing on the daffodils. All progress toward spring will slow down for awhile now.

Shadbolt's ghosts

Nobody could call the paintings in The Ghost Universe cheerful, portraying as they do "crawling insects, totemic shapes and stick figures contained in fields of colliding forces." The allusions, according to the description of the Jack Shadbolt exhibition now on at the Equinox Gallery, are to environmental destruction, war and the collisions of indigenous and colonial cultures.

Why, then, did I find it all vaguely comforting? The paintings were done between 1949 and 1959, after Shadbolt had spent time in war-bombed London, going through Holocaust images for the Canadian military. A quote excerpted for the show revealed what he was thinking at the time --  about "growing tensions in the world situation," an "undercurrent of unrest and unfilfillment in our contemporary society," and the problem of individuals adjusting "to a disheartening complex society."  

Yesterday, today -- the issues are the same, slightly reworded. To see that understanding encapsulated in beautifully realized paintings, neatly displayed in the serene white space of the gallery's great hall, is, somehow, wonderful.

One of the paintings in the show. I see unhappy faces, a dog perhaps, and maybe some insects, but  I don't pretend to understand it.  In a 1980 interview,  Jack Shadbolt  told art historian Ian Thom that  seeing the ruins of bombed-out London helped even him understand the nature of abstraction. "When the bomb blows the building apart it abstracts it, the pieces fall back together again and you get a memory image of what was there but vastly altered and psychologically made infinitely more intense than the original thing."

The quote on the gallery wall that made me wonder whether Shadbolt, who died in 1998, was speaking contemporaneously.

Outside the Equinox Gallery's new location on Great Northern Way. The clouds were scudding over the mountains, and the colourful graffiti looked like outdoor art. John, who took the photo, says he always finds something to photograph from this parking lot.

Spring things

When I talked to my brother in the Red Deer area last week, he was pleased that the weather was improving. It was to be minus 16 the next day, he said -- balmy compared to the minus 20s and 30s his part of Alberta has seen this winter. Not to be too gloaty,  I told him we'd had the fifth-wettest January on record, with almost 250 millimetres of rain and hardly any sun for a whole month. I didn't say the crocuses are almost blooming, and the daffodil buds are showing yellow.

 Here are a few scenes I've come across lately in my wet -- but very very warm -- city.

The on-again, off-again lake in our local park is back, thanks to a winter of heavy rain. People seem to be enjoying it so much I think it should be a regular feature. One little girl (wearing rain boots) was wading in it with her dog.

The pier-like structure is the base of the kids' zip-line in the park. The bench their parents usually watch them from has its feet in the water.

The pink dawn viburnum is blooming in front of our house.

Elderly kale that has seen a hard winter is almost as big as a shrub in this boulevard garden box. It doesn't look very edible.

Crocuses ready to bloom with a little bit of sunshine.

The winter sweet by my front steps. It doesn't look like much, but the scent is tropical.

A batch of white snowdrops and yellow spring flowers in someone's front garden.

I always learn the name of these yellow ones, then forget it for the following year. But I know they're not dandelions!

This is how my brave little delphinium looked after our week or so of snow this winter. I thought it was going to make it -- perhaps put out some early blooms -- but shortly after I took this photo, it turned black and died. 

Hellebores are a cheerful splash of colour in early spring gardens.

My neighbour's drift of snowdrops. 

The earliest  daphne, one of three different types I planted last year, should be scenting the garden soon.

My primulas are a little ragged, but they're on their second season, and I applaud their efforts to make a comeback. 

I have one big witch hazel in my garden, but planted a second one last year because I want the scent in stereo. This is the little guy, blooming away.