To the bank on Friday to pay bills. (One of the advantages of being horrible at money stuff is that a person gets an extra charge out of doing easy, virtuous stuff, like getting the bills done.) I put all the paperwork into my small backpack and walked down, trudging through new snow, on a day so beautiful it made my eyes ache. It was just cold enough to tease and refresh and to make you grateful for mittens, but mild enough for hatlessness. Trees stood in their upright beauty against a sky of the purest and most exquisite blue. Down by the bridge, the creek broke through layers of greeny ice, layered like expensive antique glass, and light bounced and sparked off the dark water.

Everything that light touched looked special and loved. I noticed, as I never had before in almost 12 years, the wall of a building, old tin painted barn red, and it looked so handsome, rich and satisfying. Bursts of pigeons sprang into the clear air, up from the roof of the old hotel, fanning out and wheeling over the taxi stand and Salvation Army shop; light flashed from their dove-grey wings. And the snow, new yesterday, lay drifted and piled, shadowed bluish, light and perfect and glittering gently, as beautiful as only new snow can be.

People looked good, too, in that light. I noticed a woman coming out of the drug store, one of the poor ones in tired clothes, her brown hair hanging stringy and lank around her broad white face, but all I could really see was the gentleness and sweetness in her eyes, the ready kindness of her smile, her friendliness. The rough, friendly guy on the passing garbage truck hollered "Hiya! Gidday!" as we passed each other, and the big blue truck itself (we have only the one) looked just fine; they've tied a large stuffed moose-toy to the front rad, I see, very decorative.

It's times like this I love this place so much, not for being perfect (which, God knows, it isn't) but simply for *being*. And when that happens, it comes to mind that maybe, just maybe, that's how God loves me. God had better not love me for being perfect, because then I'm in real trouble. But God's loving light is as clear, as mild, as honest and as gentle as that light today, and in it, we all look as good as that poor woman looked: not beautiful in the way this world understands, but shining in grace.

It also occured to me that you can only have winter days like this by dint of doing WINTER, and that means winter with its beauty and winter with its inconveniences: winter with pipe-bursting cold that kills drunks asleep under city bridges; winter with black ice and difficult driving and everything conditional on the weather; winter that goes on until, late in March, you're willing to murder anyone who even MENTIONS snow. You can't have the one without the other.

I don't know where we got it into our head that Creation was going to be nice. Come to think of it, I don't know where we got it into our head the Nice was the same as Good. We don't, in Canada, question the inevitability of winter; it's just part of the year, to be alternately endured and enjoyed, a mixture of hardship and beauty and just plain boredom. It's a given.

So what made us think that ordinary suffering is somehow unnatural, something to be avoided at all costs? Fun it isn't, nobody ever said it was, and it isn't something to be courted. It's stupid to go out ill-dressed on a bitter January day, as though that wholly uncalled-for suffering could somehow make you a Better Person. That's just courting frostbite for no good reason. On the other hand, there's not much point in whinging about winter, if you live in Canada. It just *is*, with its beauty and bitterness, and life would be greatly the poorer if it weren't like that.

Creation is a mixed bag. We are both genuinely good people and genuinely streaked through with very real faults that we would very much rather not look at too closely, thank you very much. Our experience is bitter-sweet. You can't take the struggle and soreness out of life without taking out the life as well. You can't make yourself an angel, however hard you try, without destroying your humanity--and also stashing away some parts of yourself where you can't keep an eye on them, and God alone knows what they get up to while you're pretending that they're circling Alpha Centauri.

Lots of Canadians go south for the winter, avoiding January altogether. I can't blame them; that's their choice. But they miss out on days like this, as well as on the lousy stuff. Lots of other Canadians won't get their noses out of their navels enough to look around at days like this because they're too wrapped up in Hating Winter, or too tunnel-visioned to notice. They too have lost something, and that's sad.

Take winter and yourself as you and winter are, with realism and clarity, but also a willingness to find the good, to see where beauty lurks. Which sounds easy, until you think about it... I don't know many people who are honest with themselves AND loving; it seems to be, too often, one or the other but not both. But both it must be, even if we wobble rather uncertainly between these poles. The one sin that can't be forgiven is denying that I'm a sinner--but I sin just as much when I fail to see my own beauty.

The people at the bank were their usual cheerful selves; I managed to crack up my favorite teller. Back up the main drag, through the old Canadian Tire lot to the supermarket for lemons and bread; then home through the beauty to a lunch of lentil soup. Thanks be to God.