Today is the annual general meeting of the Picture Butte Golf and Winter Club. I can handle the Golf, but I’m not sure about the Winter.

I’m not alone. It’s been difficult going anywhere the past couple of weeks without hearing people grumble about a prolonged, cold winter. They seem to take it as a personal affront. Earlier this week as friend Ian, wearing his toque, shivered up my front walk, he was about to say, “I hate winter,” but I beat him to it. He said it anyway. Grrr.

Then there was the guy who had had about enough when he couldn’t use his hair gel after a morning workout, because it froze sitting in his gym bag in the car.

It’s easy in mid-March of a La Nina Southern Alberta winter to grow impatient (in the summer I grow Impatience) as the temperature hovers in the low -20s. It’s particularly trying when you’re sweeping the snow off the walk for the thousandth time and you uncover tulips and daffodils peeking out of their beds about an inch. Even they know it’s time to get on with it. I expect the crocuses in the front garden to be in bloom before the end of the month, but that seems too remote when you awake to CJOC’s Veryl Todd warning you of a -33 C wind chill.

The other day as I chatted over the phone with my daughter-in-law Rebecca, I heard the young, shrill voices of the grand kids in the background.

“They’ve got a bit of cabin fever,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s tough to get them outside when it’s -25.” Seems like it has been -25 all winter in Saskatoon. Here too.

It’s said that cabin fever affects about 25 per cent of the population in northern latitudes. It can be a form of depression from retreating indoors during the cold weather. Symptoms include inactivity, crankiness, sleep loss, and simply feeling down in the dumps. Seasonal affective disorder is a more severe form of cabin fever caused by reduced sunlight.

The good news is that on the first day of spring come Friday, the amount of daylight equals the amount of darkness so we’re on our way out of it.

The average high temperature during the past eight years here on March 14 is 7 C, the average low -6.1, similar for the first day of spring and much better than -25. Which isn’t to say it can’t still be -25, but I’d rather be an optimist.

It’s not that there haven’t been respites. I can recall a couple of wonderful winter days that warmed the spirit as well as the skin. They helped remind me that even though we live in one of those northern latitudes where long nights and short days can get you down, in Southern Alberta it can change for the better in the snap of a cold spell.

It feels good knowing golf’s just the other side of that shrinking snowdrift.

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