First Snow

Not down here in the lowlands, but for me up in the mountains.

Everyone hates meetings right? I mean that's just a given. A meeting is a slow and often tedious way of conveying information that could be done by e-mail.

Often, yes.

But not when your half-termly professional meeting is hosted by your colleagues that run the bear habitat on a local mountain.
And they get you issued with free parking and ski-lift passes.

And on the way up the mountain you are able to look down and see wolves in one direction, and in the other, the whole of the lower mainland glittering beneath your gaze.
Then halfway up you pass the snow-line and outcrops are frosted with snow. And then the snow itself starts falling.

You are taken across beautiful, glistening snowfall to a chalet where you get to sit in a cosy room around a wood-burning fire, eating fruit and cookies and Nanaimo bars while snow swirls outside the windows.

When darkness falls, you crunch outside over the mountain to the bear habitat where the zoologist talks to you about the impending quasi-hibernation of the two grislies that you are watching.

On the way down again, the beautiful city stretches out before you, sparkling and twinkling, like an illuminated model city surrounded by descending cloud and dark, shimmering water.
In the night sky ahead of you, a golden sliver of moon, which you can see reflected in the river below.

Wouldn't you go willingly, excitedly to that meeting, wouldn't you drive across the entire city just to spend an hour discussing and receiving information that could have been sent out by e-mail?

Yeah, me too.