A first winter

Amara arrived in Winnipeg in the second week of October. She had seen snow once before, on a school trip to a mountain, and she had held it in her hands for about a minute before it melted. Nobody had told her that snow could stay.

The first fall came at the end of the month. She woke up, looked out, and thought the city had been painted overnight. She put on the coat she had bought in Lagos, which the shop had called a winter coat, and she walked to the bus stop feeling pleased with herself.

She lasted eleven minutes. By the time the bus came, her fingers had stopped working properly and her ears hurt in a way she had not known ears could hurt. An older woman at the stop looked at her coat, then at her face, and said one word: "Mitts."

That afternoon Amara learned the first rule, which is that the cold is not one thing. There is the cold that makes you walk faster, and there is the cold that gets underneath the cloth and stays there, and they need different clothes. She learned the second rule a week later, standing in a shop with three kinds of glove in her hands. The warm ones are the ones that look ridiculous. Anything that looks elegant is for October.

By December she had a system. Boots by the door, always. A hat that covered the ears, not the fashionable kind that sits on the back of the head. Two pairs of socks. A scarf that went over the nose when the wind came from the north, which it usually did.

What surprised her was not the difficulty. It was how ordinary it became. In January the radio said minus thirty-one and she checked whether she needed the heavier coat, the way she might once have checked whether she needed an umbrella. Her neighbour, who had lived there forty years, complained about it constantly and would not have moved anywhere else.

She also learned that winter is social. People stop in doorways to talk about it. Strangers tell you your coat is not warm enough. Somebody always helps push a car out of a snowbank, and the next week you are the one pushing. In October she had thought of the cold as something she would have to survive alone. By February she understood that the whole city was doing it together, loudly, with opinions.

In March there was a day when the snow went soft and the air smelled like wet ground, and she found that she was sorry. Not very sorry. But the winter had become hers, in the way a difficult thing becomes yours once you have got through it, and she was not ready to give it back.

She has now had six winters. She still tells new arrivals the same thing the woman at the bus stop told her, and they look at her the way she once looked at that woman, and then in eleven minutes they learn it for themselves.