Snowmageddon

Well it’s finally here. After days of advanced warnings, a Toronto preview, and the Weather Channel’s red-screened alerts, snowmageddon has arrived.

It remains to be seen how much snow we get and whether the storm lives up to all the hype, but it’s starting off well. A blustery snow-swirly day – terrible for those on the roads or trying to fly anywhere, but perfect for snowshoeing in the woods followed by a hot drink and a good book in front of the fire.

And since I have nowhere to go for the next 48 hours, let it snow!

UPDATE: 4 hours later, the storm is past and the sun is shining in a clear, blue sky. There's a lousy 10 centimetres of snow on the ground. We've been cheated!

Abominations and thoughts thereon

A couple of weeks ago I had a rare occasion to be in a church, attending a Christmas concert in which my wife was singing in the choir. The music was delightful, the church was beautifully decorated, and best of all, the pews were padded. Someone said it was because for this particular faith the services frequently ran to two hours and if the pews weren’t padded everyone would leave half way through. I didn’t really care why, my bum was comfy and that’s all that mattered to me.

At the mid-point of the concert there was a 20-minute musical interlude by a solo harpist of, apparently, some renown. This immediately put the bulk of the audience, the average age of which seemed to be about 65, to sleep.

To keep myself from nodding off along with the rest (it was, after all, my normal nap time) I started perusing the Bible conveniently placed in the rack in front of me, in full knowledge that by my so doing the devil might actually be lacing up his ice skates. And so while the harpist who, if truth be known, would much rather be up there wearing a Stetson, strumming a guitar and singing sad country songs about lost loves and trucks, played on to the sonorous accompaniment of 100 nap-deprived seniors, I was reading Leviticus and trying to sort out all the various abominations contained therein.

Abomination. It’s one of those words that really doesn’t need a definition. You only have to hear it spittle-sprayed from the mouth of a raging fundamentalist once to immediately grasp its meaning. It’s a mean, nasty word, too often used by mean, nasty people with mean, nasty intent, but it immediately reminded me of this – one of the many great scenes from The West Wing.

Perhaps they could be used to wax eloquent.

Christmas is a festival of light and candles have traditionally played a key part in decorating for, and celebrating the season. But in recent years Christmas candles have become problematic: there are just too many of them and you can’t get rid of the damned things.

Every year we buy new candles because last year’s are too dusty, melted from the summer attic heat, or just aren’t quite right for this year’s decorating theme. And then friends and relatives add to the inventory because candles are the ultimate gift – safe and suitable for all ages and sexes and relationships, and inexpensive enough that the recipient doesn’t necessarily feel compelled to reciprocate. Meanwhile, the old ones just get put back into storage, and the candle supply grows, year after year, at a rate we could only dream would be matched by our stock market investments – an indestructible bubble that will never burst.

Now if we actually burned our Christmas candles this wouldn’t be a problem, but Christmas candles never, ever get burned.

Her: “Don’t light that candle!”
Him: “Why not? They’re candles. They’re supposed to be burned.”
Her: “But then they won’t look nice.”
Him: (rolls eyes) “Okay. “ (turns on the lights)

So by the time Christmas actually rolls around every flat surface in the house is festooned with these virginal wax creations. To eat dinner at the table, you first have to remove the candle centre-piece. If you want to open the window, you have to move the candles off the sill. Bed-side tables, bathroom counters, coffee tables – even the fireplace mantle gets the treatment.

(Let me interject a word of caution here for the novice candle decorator. Rising heat from a fireplace will soften the candles leaving them looking like the ‘before’ image in a Viagra ad. If you don’t want Aunt Mable blushing and tittering into the back of her daintily-gloved hand, you’d better have a fresh, stiff set of replacements handy before the family arrives for Christmas dinner.)

By New Year’s Eve we have enough wax of various colours and shapes lying around to open a local Madame Tussaud’s. However since that’s not going to happen, I need a way to get rid of our dusty, our melted, our old, and our droopy so I don’t have to pack them all up again for next year.

Of the night

This morning we awoke to 10 cm of fresh snow. In addition to re-decorating the trees after Monday’s thaw, the snow provided pure white witness to a hidden, night-time world.

Our resident red fox had come out of the woods, looped around the house and then headed down to the lake, hunting. His track in the snow shows that, at least in the immediate area, he was unsuccessful in his search for an early breakfast.

Not so for the owl. Out in the open, a large splash of wing marks abruptly terminates the tiny footprints of a small rodent, caught exposed in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sometime after the snow stopped a flock of wild turkeys passed through, leaving their tracks on the road rather than venturing into the deeper snow in the forest.

And the deer – depending on your point of view either beautiful creatures of the forest, loathsome pests, or dinner – spent the dawn hours foraging among the remnants of last summer’s gardens looking for any previously missed morsel of greenery.

Over the day human activity, wind, and more snow obliterated the nocturnal record, but until then we had a tantalizing glimpse of life, and death, in the natural world that we would not get at any other time of the year. Just one more reason why winter is the most magical of seasons.

Dashing through the ... slush?

As the Prairies freeze in unseasonably cold temperatures, back here in eastern Ontario we’re in the midst of the first of this winter’s warm spells. Today it was 8°C and pouring rain. The 1½ feet of snow we had on the ground has all but disappeared, and our snow-packed lane is now nothing but a few inches of heavy, wet slush.

And the worst part is yet to come as the winds pick up speed and swing around to the north, the temperatures plummet turning all that water on the roads to sheets of ice, and our lane freezes into a rutted obstacle course, nearly impassable to anything but a full-on four-wheel-drive vehicle.

In short, it’s a mess. And although it’s a mess we deal with two or three times every winter, it never gets easier to take because there really is nothing to do but curse the weatherman. Irrational I know, but everybody needs somebody to hate. And besides, who else gets to keep their job with accuracy statistics only slightly higher than Bush’s popularity rating. Well, except for pro ball players where a .300 batting average is considered exceptional and worth $50 million a year. But then they don’t have a slush problem in Puerto Rico.

But back at the lake, if today’s sunset is anything to go by, tomorrow will be a nice, cold, clear day and life will be back to normal – assuming the winds don’t drop a tree on a power line, or the house, or the truck, or....

The road

The road runs through the open spaces of farmer’s fields for a few kilometres before it connects to the highway and its snarl of transport trucks and daily commuters. Once a concession road that served as access for the few farms along its length, the road is now used as a bypass to avoid the village with its 50 kilometre-per-hour speed limit and single stop sign because those just “slow you down too much”.

But except for a few minutes in the morning and afternoon when the countrified urbanites who have moved out here rush to and from their jobs in the city, the road is pretty quiet, with the silence broken only by the infrequent rumble of a tractor being shifted from one field to another, or the sound of the train whistle as the twice-daily freight thunders past on the nearby level crossing.

Beside the road, under a solitary maple tree hundreds of metres from the nearest house, someone placed these two chairs. In the winter the prevailing winds blow around them, creating intricate patterns in the drifts of snow. And in the summer, someone carefully tends the grass, plants a few flowers, and keeps the corn rows from encroaching. But no one is ever seen sitting in them.

So year round they stand there, begging those travelers of the road who are in no rush to be someplace else to stop and sit a while.

Perhaps I’ll do that one day.

I don’t need 100 words for snow...

Popular legend says there are hundreds of Inuit words for snow, although linguistics scholars peg the number at probably closer to a dozen. In the English language we tend to be a bit less descriptive and have only a few terms for the white stuff, relying instead on a wide range of adjectives to provide a precise narrative - squeeky snow, fluffy snow, fresh snow, and so on.

And when our feelings towards snow are not that positive we can simply combine one of those few English words ('snow' works well) with any of the dozen or so pejorative adjectives commonly applied to it (‘damned’ being one of the least objectionable) singly or in combination to get approximately 874,216 negative snow-related expressions.

I used most of them this morning.

Lesson of the day: do not stand under a 100-foot snow-laden pine tree when the wind blows.

I had snow so far down my back I had to shake my shorts out and my socks got wet.