Winter is beginning to close in on us. For those who worry that there will be a dearth of snow this year and that Christmas will arrive green and grey, not sparkling white, finally nature has delivered a signal that informs us otherwise, so they can rest their concerns.

After I'd taken our puppies to the ravine for their usual hour's ramble in the woods yesterday, and my husband and I had enjoyed our own walk on the street, because he has not yet himself arrived at that point where he has amassed sufficient energy, recapturing his pre-surgery strength, I decided to finish up the garden tidying.

I waited until he had fallen into an afternoon nap, reading the book he's currently immersed in, and then out I went, leaving the puppies to watch over him. Out came the wheelbarrow and my relatively short-handled spade and I set to work emptying all the garden pots at the front of the house of their soil. I had long ago taken all the plants growing in them out for composting. These are large, really large pots. I had already emptied the large-sized clay pots at a much earlier time, but they're a mere quarter of the size of the large garden pots.

It took awhile, but the weather was perfect, cool and breezy, no rain predicted until the evening hours. Most of the soil found its place in the garden beds at the front of the house, but I did trundle a few wheelbarrows full over to the garden beds in the backyard as well. This is an annual ritual we've been engaged in for many years; the garden beds seem to handily absorb all that extra soil, which is useful. The past few years or so it's a job my husband had taken over from me.

Post-surgery, I had little option but to silently renegotiate the ritual. And it wasn't bad at all, just removing the soil from the pots, shovel by shovel, filling up the wheelbarrow and shifting the soil around to the gardens. I always found it, and still do, invigorating, really enjoyable being out in cool fall weather doing things like that. My husband did wake from his nap to find me gone, shouting out the front door to ask what I thought I was doing. By then I was almost finished.

This morning we were greeted by mixed precipitation because the temperature has descended to hover around freezing. And the weather prediction for the day is that it would continue to plunge, and we were to expect five to ten centimetres of snow. More tomorrow, much more. My husband hied himself off to fill up the gasoline container he uses for the snow thrower. And when he returned, he informed me he would be busy for a few more minutes outside.

It took him no time at all before he had trundled all those heavy pottery garden pots using his hand truck, for storage alongside the bricked-in area between two garden beds. And he covered them all with an extra-long tarpaulin, so as far as the garden is concerned, we're finally finished winterizing it. Ordinarily, he stores those pots either under the deck, or behind the sheds, snugly covering them with a tarpaulin. Under the circumstances, we considered it more efficient to store them closer to where they stood, since come spring they'll be returned to the same stations they occupy during the summer months.

An hour after my husband came back into the house, his self-assigned task completed, the ground was being thickly covered with snow, the heavy droplets of mixed rain and snow transformed to thick clusters of snow to match the drop in temperature. This was one of those serendipitous 'just-in-time' events that gives one a glow of satisfaction in the wake of a job well done -- under rather compromised circumstances.