The coldest temperature I’ve ever been in was a -64 C windchill (-83.2 F for those of you in my new homeland.)

Everything becomes impossibly quiet after the mercury tumbles down the basement stairs.

Perhaps that’s because everything capable of making a noise either crawls into a hole or dies on the spot — but even the sound of cars and trucks going by (because “Up North”, where these temperatures happen, people will drive through a glacier without blinking) seems muted.

You don’t even hear the wind — though it’s certainly there, because nothing would be quite so bitterly frigid without it.

And I love it.

I love that quiet.

I love it because I know there’s life in the midst of it — house lights buttery little squares into the white streets — but I still feel like the only person caught in a perfect Meg-size snowglobe.

I crave standing out in the cold air, and basking in the crisp, crystalline absence-of-everything… but after a split second, my eyelashes will be be fused together, and my skin will experience something ironically akin to burning. And I’ll have to go inside.

Still, in that second before the cold goes for your throat, it’s pure magic.

You’d think the thrill of that pertinacious quiet would have me seeking more bucolic surroundings to live in day-to-day — perhaps somewhere in the country, where you don’t need snow to muffle the sounds around you. But I’m actually a city girl, through and through.

I love the rumble of engines and faint hints of car stereo bass, the over-loud conversations of people going by my windows at all hours, the squawking birds and barking dogs and howling cats… all the hubbub and din of people existing cheek-by-jowl.

The only quiet we get here, it seems, is when it snows.

Snow in the city brings a modified version of the “Up North” hush, but adds shrieking, blissed-out kids with ice-crunching boots, and the calamitous rumble of salt and plow trucks paving the way for smug SUV drivers… and teenagers ready to do e-brake spins in abandoned parking lots.

All of which makes me smile.

I love our snow for the not-too-long break it gives us from the usual. I love the whitewashed landscape, and the way it coats the bare tree branches like buttercream frosting (coconut, I think… not vanilla.)

Mind you, I don’t love that it takes me two hours longer to get everywhere I need to go, or that all snow-friendly hats make me look bullet-headed and stout, or that our grocery stores are all a fair walk away (complete with hills for me to slide down, usually on my face), or that our little apartment turns into a mini-fridge… still, I adore the way the world seems that much more serene for a few hours.

Before long, the bustle of our Charlestown neighborhood will return with a vengeance — but until then it feels like we’re all taking a nap together under a giant, white quilt.

Snow in Vancouver (the kind I’ve experienced for the past decade) is far more like taking a nap under a thousand Sprite-flavored Slurpees. There is no silence, because everyone rushes outside wailing, “WHOA, IT’S SNOWING!” and sprints to their cars in inappropriate shoes — at which point they shoot like cannons out of slushy driveways to get into accidents.

Snow in New England (though greeted by the same cacophony that snow is greeted with in Vancouver, which seems odd, because HEY, IT GETS COLD HERE) is so much better.

It turns a city into a series of tiny, insular villages… just long enough for you to fall in love with how it feels, but not so long that you consider eating a member of your family because you can’t get french toast supplies.

Apparently, we’re getting snow this Tuesday night.

I know storm warnings send panic into the hearts of many — especially people who live on touchy electrical grids that might lose power, people planning to fly (and admittedly, when snow messed up my flights at Christmas, I forgot this kind of nostalgia promptly!), anyone that needs bare streets to get around, and families with kids who will stay home and cry out to be entertained.

And I know our apartment will be full of the “snap! snap! snap!” of plasticked windows bulging and flexing in the wind, and that our floors will become ice rinks, and that invariably, my love of shopping for groceries day to day will bite us in the arse…

… but I’m still kind of excited.

For that few hours when nothing can be done except watch it fall.

For the morning glance out the window to discover everything has been scrubbed clean and coated in white.

For watching the kids run by in starfish-shaped snowsuits, hands chapped and red (because gloves must be removed to ensure a better snowball.)

And for that rare, perfect, short-lived quiet… a quiet I’ll break only for a sigh of contentment.