It's starting to snow again in Vancouver – the latest in a series of unseasonable events this winter in what's supposed to be Canada's mild West Coast.

Few things take me back to childhood as much as the sight of white flakes in the sky. I see them, and I'm suddenly transported back to the living room window of our house on Bearbrook Road, wondering if this would be the snowfall that closed the schools for the day. Or the front passenger seat of my parents' car, with my dad driving, windshield wipers urgently dialing slush off the windshield, and the snow doing that swooping-toward-you thing it does when you're in a moving car – a feeling of danger barely held at bay by the reassuring presence of a parent. Or walking home from a friend's house at eight or nine, when the sky turned orange with reflected streetlight and the tires of passing cars crunched grooves in the road.