Weather Underground says we’ve got more snow incoming — not much, they say — and I haven’t even got around to posting my pics of the last snow. Here goes.
Thursday morning I woke up to snow covering my skylights, two inches of snow on my deck. It was the kind of snow everybody who isn’t snowphobic loves: light, scenic, and gone by midafternoon. A marked contrast to last weekend’s heavy, crusty stuff that knocked out power, required heavy-duty plowing, and screwed people’s backs up. My back was already screwed up so I managed to get out of shoveling. (Thank you again, neighbors!) This time around, the snow was fluffy and my back was better. Shoveling was easy.
Snow makes even tire tracks look pretty. All the resident motor vehicles have all-wheel drive, so Wednesday night’s snowfall was no big deal. This is the back way out from our driveway.
Travvy and I headed off down Pine Hill on our morning walk. No Yaktrax needed: the walking was easy.
We walk this way almost every day, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in the other. It’s not an especially scenic vista, but it catches my eye again and again, no matter what the season. The trail. The snow-dusted trees. The texture of the yellow grass rising above the snow.
Cold cotton, I thought, maybe because I’m reading Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a stupendously good book about the “Great Migration” of black people from the South to the North and West during the twentieth century. One of the main threads follows a woman who was a sharecropper on a Mississippi cotton plantation in the 1930s. The descriptions of the back-breaking work, the heat, and the virtual servitude in which the planters kept the sharecroppers are very, very vivid.
I’ve been listening a lot lately to Eric Bibb’s Friends CD, which includes the song “Just Look Up” (Michael Jerome Browne and B. Markus). Tree, snow, clouds, sky. Yeah. Just look up.
From the Seasonally Occupied Territories . . . 
Love the pics of the lane, especially. Could entice me to leave my cocoon for a crisp walk.
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Walking down snowy lanes is good. OTOH, if your temps are still in the vicinity of -37, virtual walks might be better. OTTH, never discount the motivational power of a resident dog who needs to go out occasionally . . .
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Tru dat …
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the first photograph, of tire tracks disappearing around the bend, is so enticing. what lies around that bend? what new sights can be found? i’ve driven around many such bends, just to see what i can see.
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Your statement “We walk this way almost every day, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in the other. It’s not an especially scenic vista, but it catches my eye again and again, no matter what the season” puts me in mind of another wonderful WordPress blog I follow, Julian Hoffman’s “Notes from Near and Far” (http://julianhoffman.wordpress.com/). He lives near the remote Prespa Lakes in northern Greece and he simply roams and photographs the seemingly empty countryside, in all weathers, and manages to find teeming life everywhere.
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Not long after I moved here, a woman who’d been here a lot longer said that the big challenge of island driving was boredom. Good point. You drive the same roads over and over again and after a while you stop paying attention. (This is when a deer jumps out in front of your car.) But after you’ve driven the same road over and over and over again, in every conceivable weather condition, at every time of day, you might start noticing that it’s never the same and you’re always noticing something that’s escaped you for 10, 20, going on 30 years. There’s something to be said for staying in the same place for a long time . . .
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Another side to the familiarity of roads—
I followed the same winding route to the cottage for 45 years: Get off the highway at Panmure and buy some just-picked corn or other seasonal veggies from the farm stand. Turn left eventually and wait to cross the one-lane stone bridge at Pakenham. Stop for homemade milkshakes for me and the kids/grandkids. Blink and miss the achingly beautiful little village of Waba. Pass by White Lake. Coast down the steep hill (whee), go over the bridge, and ascend through the artists’ colony at Braeside. Approach Renfrew from the back side (95 km so far). And so on and so on. And yet I was in a mild panic every time, because I thought I would get lost. (Of course, there was a direct route: Killer Highway for 100 km; left at Cobden; right at flashing lights; left at dirt road.)
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