Poor us. Winter has departed and spring is arriving everywhere, just not here, where we are. Another snowstorm this morning. The third this week, actually. No sooner do we dig ourselves out of the latest  snow dump than another appears on the horizon. Trouble is, it doesn't stay on the horizon, it moves steadily over our winter landscape and unlatches the door to that low metallic ceiling that stores all those wondrously brilliant-white snowflakes and lets go.

The exercise, time and again, leaving us bemused. There is nothing quite as mesmerizing as focusing on fresh falling snow; there are so many permutations; light snow, clumps of snow, wet snow, dry snow, large flakes, minuscule snowflakes, swiftly falling, lazily descending, and they all have their singular characteristics. I keep meaning to take a photograph of an igloo that appeared one day on a lawn down the street. I don't believe it was constructed in the traditional Inuit way, cutting blocks of ice and setting them atop one another.

Our son who spends a lot of his winter out in the alpine reaches of British Columbia was once instructed in the fine points of igloo-building; there's a way to do it properly, and to manage that curve at the top. He's been involved on the rare occasion with igloo-building, once even slept overnight in one. This igloo down the street is very large. And it's also potentially dangerous, so we hope that the parents who built it for their young children are aware of its potential to collapse as soon as milder weather is here to stay.

We have an awful lot of snow to melt, at some point. And that point may begin in the next several weeks, despite the ongoing snowstorms. When it begins to melt it seems to take forever. Some people take to trying to chop up the ice on their driveways, anxious to see them free of snow and ice, others shovel into the snowpack on their lawns to try to distribute the snow evenly so it will melt faster. The accumulated snow  tends to be much higher, needless to say, at the edges of driveways adjacent lawns where the snow is thrown or blown when driveways are cleaned out after snowstorms, and they can attain considerable heights.

 

Today's storm blew itself out after 1:00 in the afternoon, and Irving fired up the snowthrower to ream out the walkways in the backyard for Jackie and Jillie, then proceeded down the side of the house and the walkways at the front of the house. By the time he was finished the last of the snow descending also completed its mission.

We decided to wait awhile before heading out to the ravine -- to give others the chance to get out on the trails and tamp them down a bit. As things turned out it was a little more difficult tramping through the snow on the street to get to the ravine entrance than through the trails in the forest. They had indeed been nicely tamped down by many boots before ours entered. Yet for the hour-and-a-half that we made our way through a short circuit we saw few other people.

The snow is deep in the ravine, undulating gracefully over the hillsides in smooth, bright-white comforters. The trees and forest shrubs are all thick with snow, a dazzling sight when eyes are accustomed to seeing dark brown tree trunks against the lofty white of the forest floor, and instead encounter white everywhere. Branches and boughs are brought low, groaning under the weight and depth of snow they now carry.

But at the same time there was a brisk wind, particularly in the higher reaches at the canopy level and it was doing a fine job of releasing snow from the trees, falling in wide arcs thick with descending snow. We became well covered with snow, walking beneath trees that suddenly shook lose of their snow burden.

When we left the house the temperature had risen from morning's -6C, to -1C, and a light sprinkling of rain stopped us in our tracks on the way up the street; should we continue or return home? It's cold enough to be very unpleasant if we got very wet; so is it going to rain heavily or not? The dark clouds moving quickly across the sky gave us no hint of what was to come. But suddenly the sun came out from behind those clouds and they quickly scudded off, ushered away by the wind to reveal that wonderful blue of a clear winter sky.