Yup, it's winter now

It’s here, never mind what the date says. It’s exactly a week before Christmas and three more days till the solstice, but winter has arrived this time. It’s here.

We knew it yesterday when we woke up and saw the season’s first wisps of sea smoke sweeping out over the harbour. And we knew it the day before when the temperature began to drop through the afternoon and the damp leaves I was raking up began to stiffen and freeze. It was a blast of cold air, straight out of the northwest, with a drop overnight of about 15 degrees that brought a wind chill yesterday of minus 23, not Edmonton by any means, but plenty cold for here, cold enough in fact to make sea smoke and cold enough to say, yes, it’s winter.

This morning we have sea smoke again. The temperature is minus 13 and the wind chill 10 degrees colder, and the old frostbite in my fingertips is still aching from being outside long enough to load the blue bags of recyclables into the cold car, brush the snow off, tie the green cart on behind, and take them all up to the road. There was a bunch of cuttings from the hydrangea to tie up, but my fingertips decided I should wait for an easier day and get rid of them next time around.

Around sunset yesterday Lorraine plugged in our outside winter lights – the darkness does surround us pretty early these days – and took a few images.

When I went out on the deck much later to unplug them it had snowed a little and the sound it made under my boots was wonderful. It made me think of a couple of lines from my Grade 3 reader that have always stuck with me:

I love snow when it squeaks like leather
Or two wooden spoons that you rub together.

The leather simile makes perfect sense when you hear that kind of snow under your boots; as to the wooden spoons, I’m not so sure, but for Grade 3 students it at least gave us a rhyme to remember.

This poetic phenomenon seems to happen only with the snow that drifts down on these very cold dry days or nights, which doesn’t happen often here with our somewhat temperate maritime climate, but when it does it’s always a treat. And this morning that same snow with its squeaky crystalline structure swept easily (not enough yet for the shovel) from the walkway.

So today it really is winter and we will look for happy ways to adjust to it, like getting a Christmas tree, lighting some candles in the evening, and inviting friends to celebrate the coming of the season.