Northern Ivy

They had said three days before on TV that there might be a snowstorm, that friday. It was in the middle of february, so nobody was surprised; in fact, most people were rather pleased at the news since it hadn't snowed for two weeks, and what fun is there to have in winter when it's only cold? Ski buffs were already changing their plans for the weekend, children were taking out their sleds and crossing their fingers, hoping the storm would be big enough so that school would be off on Monday... What they didn't see coming was the large mass of warm air going north along the eastern United States. Well, actually they saw it coming, but they thought it would be gone when the storm arrived. It wasn't. This meant that all the snow that was supposed to fall on Montreal on that Friday was, in fact, rain. So the snow storm expected by everyone was replaced by a massive ice storm.
The first day it felt sort of magical, when you put aside the fact that you had to walk very slowly to avoid falling at every step. When the night fell around five o'clock, rain had been pouring down for a few hours, and there was about five millimeters of ice covering everything; and it wasn't stopping. Taking the bus, or anything with wheels for that matter, was plain crazy, you had to walk if you wanted to go somewhere. So I was walking to François' apartment, where we were having dinner with a few friends. I remember taking a shortcut through the Park Lafontaine, where all the branches in the trees were hanging down under the weight of the ice, which made them look like different varieties of willow trees; but more than that, it was how they sounded that was the most beautiful. The soft wind blowing though the ice-covered branches made them sing, clicking like a thousand carillions in the exceptionally silent city night. I had to stop and listen, knowing that I would not often have the chance to hear that sound again.
When I got to my friend's place, electrical power was down; it had been for the last hour. The ice on the power lines made them heavy, and some snapped, even in the slight wind. It seemed a large line feeding most of the city was breaking up a few kilometers away, so many people had no power, and no one really knew when it would be back - we all knew this because François had a small radio that worked on batteries, and every station was talking about only one thing: the storm. Since nobody knew if there was power at home, and François had a fireplace in his living room, everyone decided to stay the night until power went back on. Ah, we were so confident!
Saturday afternoon, the rain stopped, but the ice stayed, and nobody had their power back at home. It was also beginning to get cold outside, around minus 10, like a normal mid-february day... We all went for a walk together, if you can call that a walk: there was a good 2cm of ice everywhere, including on the sidewalks, so we were more skating with boots than walking, tightly grouped so that if one seemed to fall the other six could catch him or her in half a second. We didn't plan it, it was just the optimal way of walking for a group of friends on the ice. Also it was quite funny.
We saw a lot of branches on the streets that had broken up under the weight of the ice; cars of wich you couldn't guess the making, encased as they were in their thick shielding; and a few broken power lines hanging from their post, dancing and buzzing and throwing short blue arcs of electricity on the pavement. That night, we ate pasta boiled in the fireplace, all sitting close together since it was getting rather cold in the apartment. Salvador, a friend of François from Cameroon who had come to Canada for the first time just a week before, was really beginning to be afraid. The man, always friendly, always laughing and making jokes, told us he feared for his life. At first we laughed, but then we saw he was genuinely frightened. He never really felt cold in all his life, whereas we lived with it six months a year... okay, maybe not inside our living room, but you know. We did our best to reassure him, and let him sleep right beside the fireplace that night.
The rain came again on Sunday, but this time it seemed the air was warm enough so it wouldn't freeze on the spot. It made everything melt in a few hours. City employees would have a lot of work in the next days, repairing the broken lines and taking out the branches, and it wouldn't be simple, since the weather announced in the night between Sunday and Saturday was a snow storm, a real one this time. Power was coming back gradually in the city, block by block, but since it was a little erratic we decided to spend one last night at François'.
Later, maybe around two in the morning, we still couldn't sleep so we went for a walk. The biggest part of the snow storm had passed, now there was only large snowflakes gently falling down in the cold and silent night, and we were walking up our ankles in snow. I think it was Julie who threw the first snowball, but it quickly degenerated in an all-out take-no-prisoners everyone-against-everyone snowball throwing fest. Everyone was laughing and yelling their asses off, and Salvador participated like he had done this since his early childhood.
The next morning the snow was over, the sky cloudless and the air cold and crisp; like everyone else, I went home to see if everything was back to normal. We parted without ceremony, but we felt like we had spent a weekend on vacation away from home, which we did, in a way. In the streets, the children were making snowmen and castles, all to happy that most of the schools were closed.