The mandatory winter gripe... 31st anniversary edition.

In my 20's, I was keen to leave the U.K. and fortunate to have the choice of 3 countries. Australia, the U.S; or Canada.
The first seemed an awful long way away and the very thought of living the rest of my life upside down still bothers me to this day. Dumb perhaps but I like the northern reality I live in.
The U.S. was very tempting and I did have a very good opportunity through connections I had there. Heck, I even had an invitation to meet then President Jimmy Carter, a farmer like me, whom history has deemed as being perhaps the last honest, decent President of any integrity. It was the foolish inbred British dislike for anything American that quashed that one. I regret that part of my psyche.

We arrived in Canada in February 1987.... in a blizzard.
The locals said we would get used to winter, give it a year, we'll enjoy it.
Then it was 3 years, then five years. In my mind, it hasn't stopped snowing in the last 30 years. Despite living in Alberta and savoring the most wonderfully warm summers imaginable, it's still snowing.
Every fall I look up at those beautiful birds migrating south, their calls haunt me daily until the last one disappears over the southern horizon and I sink into the sullen sadness of winter.
A few years ago we escaped this frozen wilderness to a magical kingdom called Arizona and I liked it there. I liked it a lot. The sight of Arizona sunrises and sunsets are like no other. If there is such a thing, I'm an Arizona junkie. Just can't get enough of that heat.
So you ask, what's stopping us doing the snowbird run?

Possessions.

Or more accurately, we are owned by our possessions. We have so many we cannot leave them because of theft, vandalism of the fear of loss in some form.
These fears are not without grounds, we have been broken into several times, even whist here at home. These parasites are fearless, brazen and without mercy. If you have it, they'll take it.
So we come to the deeper philosophical questions of which we are all aware deep down inside but we mostly avoid as being too uncomfortable to debate, much less take action upon.
But that's the subject of another entirely different gripe, to which I'll subject you at a later date.
Meanwhile, I conclude this 31st anniversary winter gripe with the comforting thought that at least there aren't too many mosquitoes out at 40 below.