Winter winds blow whilst ye still remain

I often wonder what scholars of the future will say about the things we experience everyday here and now. In much of the reading I've done on the historical Jesus or on the historical background of the New Testament, or on the formation and identity of first-century Judaism, I find that scholars make a lot of estimations about how life and culture worked long ago. Maybe the Jews of Jesus' day spoke Aramaic, or maybe they spoke Hebrew. Maybe Judaism was a very strict, legalistic system. Or, maybe it was full of grace and facilitated the understanding of God as a loving Father that Jesus taught. These sorts of academic estimations are part of the game. It makes me wonder how scholars of the 27th century will try to reconstruct daily life in the Canadian prairies.

Take, for instance, our winters. Five months of snow, sun dogs, blizzards, frozen batteries, mittens, ice rinks, and sub-zero temperatures. Maybe that's an unfair list, but they are definitely elements of winter. But suppose at a certain point in history, global warming does away with our frigid part of the year. What if, by the middle of the 22nd century, winter has seen its last snowflake, and November-March becomes an extended Autumn and slow transition to Spring. Suppose no one has seen a snowflake in many generations, and natural ice becomes a thing of legend. "Your great-great-great-great grandfather was a hockey player. He had an ice rink outside his house where he and his friends would play for hours. They called it 'scrimmage'."

I wonder if, perhaps, historians would negotiate on the actual whiteness of the snow, or quibble on how cold it really felt, or if the winters were really five months long. What effect did sub-zero temperatures, apparently dropping as low as -45C, have on the common combustion engine? Was hockey really a common pastime, or is that only a generalization? There is certainly evidence of many ice rinks in the Canadian prairies: archaeologists even unearthed what appears to be a "Zamboni," though its precise function and pronunciation is still a cause of great debate among historiomechanists.

Once in a while, usually through the reading I do for Seminary, I ponder the great expanse of time that separates us from truly understanding some of the events and people that have shaped the understanding of the world, and of ourselves, that we hold today, and I get to thinking about (admittedly ridiculous) things such as these. Anyway, while history's ever-advancing charge allows, enjoy the mundane, the normal, and even the winter.