Please Excuse the Dust.

I am sitting here, on a new server, with a fresh blog install, and I’m trying to rescue my old posts from the dust heap of oblivion with the help of the Wayback Machine. 

My last blog post was in August 2022, and I hadn’t done a blog back-up since about six months before that.  To cause further wrinkles in my forehead, that back-up didn’t save any of the images for the posts, so I’m trying to track them down.  So this site may be a bit chaotic in terms of the blog archives for a little bit.

But I am really, really glad to be back. I have big plans for this space. 🙂

And now it is December…

Confession: Despite my enthusiasm for all things Henry David Thoreau, he and I differ in our philosophies when it comes to the seasons (and especially those containing snow).

Live in each season as it passes—breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, & resign yourself to the influence of each.

—Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 23 August 1853

102 days, fifteen hours, 29 minutes until Spring!

—Karen J. McLean, The Write Kind of Life, 7 December 2021

We are expecting some snow this evening, but it is not supposed to amount to much: just 5-10 cm (roughly 2″-4″).  If it’s less than 15 cm (6″), it doesn’t really count as a snowfall, in my humble opinion, and it really doesn’t count as a “snowstorm” unless we are talking 25 cm (10″).  These are not definitions from Environment Canada, you understand.  This is just me. 🙂

I find Winter to be a most claustrophobic season.  It starts with the darkness.  At this latitude (45ºN), the sun came up at 7:52 AM, and it set at 4:43 PM.  It is lovely to see all the holiday lights against this background, but once they are turned out for the season …  Yeah.

And yet … There is still a coziness to it all, somehow.  Curling up with a book, a cup of tea, and one of the four cats and the dog is a very pleasant way to spend a day as Nature does her best to make time stand still.  The fresh snow absorbs sound (scientific fact), and so there is a certain hush, broken only by the sounds of the chains on the tires of snowploughs as they rumble down the roads.

The very best thing about Winter, though, is how much it makes this Canadian appreciate the Spring.


This post was created as part of Two Writing Teachers’ Slice of Life Challenge

You can view other writers’ contributions via the comments here.