It usually happens as winter progresses that we have a gradually accumulating snowpack. One snowstorm after another, with little in the way of melt in between makes quite a statement at the end of the season. We're nowhere near the end of the season and already have acquired quite a thick layer of snow that just isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

And, as usual, a narrow corridor begins to assume its usual proportions anywhere that people require a walkway. As we do in the backyard for our little dogs. As we do in the front of the house for daily newspaper delivery. As anyone who ventures out into the ravine does if they have any hopes of moving along.

What also happens is that entrance to the ravine becomes progressively more awkward, requiring some fancy footwork; sometimes a bit of clambering, sometimes an alternate route in. If it weren't for the fact that we have a group mailbox close to the ravine entrance we'd be even more challenged. There's a mountain of snow at least as tall as my height between the road and the usual ravine
entrance.

But now we're sidestepping the entrance through little other choice. Up to now we've been able to scramble over the accumulating snow that the municipal snowplow throws up at the side of the road, but that's no longer possible, given the 35 - 40 centimetres we've received on top of what had already accumulated over the winter.

It's amazing, in a sense, though relatively few people use the forest for their outdoor recreation and commune with nature, enough do, even in straitened circumstances such as this when you've got to fight the elements' residues that make passage beyond difficult, to create a pathway along the trails.

So we're grateful for that, as well. That others, like ourselves, find it valuable for the quality of our lives to get out into a forest environment and enjoy the brisk winter air and the lightness of being part of our natural setting.

Now 20 years of age and in her third year of university studies, our granddaughter spent the first nine years of her life from Monday to Friday in our home with us as we were her week-day day-care providers. During those formative years of her life she was exposed to many facets of life, all helping to guide her toward developing her world view and comfort with her place in the larger society of which she is an integral part.

When she was about four years old she was introduced for the first time to the fact that some people weren't quite as bright as she was, through a personal misfortune of birth. As was natural, she knew and became familiar with other young people in the neighbourhood. One of whom was a young boy approaching his teens at the time, whose family had just moved in, about six houses down from ours.

There were two boys, with only a year separating them. And it was one of the boys who regularly came around to speak with us, and with her. She knew quite readily that this boy was not endowed with what are recognized as normal milestone characteristics in mental and physical development. Aside from commenting on that observable fact, she treated him as she would anyone else and that gave us great satisfaction.

The family was friendly and made for good neighbours. They did have a problem, however, when a family living right beside them allowed their children to toss garbage into their yard, as a sign of contempt for the little boy's mental incapacities. When the boy spoke to you; seldom with you; he would recount observations, complex and well-worded that gave the hearer second pause. He actually sounded like someone who was intellectually advanced for his age. We soon discovered that he was simply repeating what he heard from his father, without understanding the meaning of what he spoke.

That aside, his temperament was friendly and accommodating. As he grew older he had few friends and conceived a particular liking for a younger boy who lived at the foot of the street, who had no trouble befriending him. Soon, however, the family found his presence irksome, since when he felt comfortable somewhere, he would be reluctant to leave. They had invited him to have meals with them when he couldn't be persuaded through subtle hints that it was time for him to leave, and soon found to their discomfort that he expected to have his meals with them frequently. They were perplexed that his parents made no effort to intervene, and that caused hard feelings.

Then as he grew into his late teen years, he was proud to inform us that he had a job. He would speak often of the job, as an employee of a local McDonald's franchise which gave him the opportunity to work in its kitchen. He was happy that in exchange for permitting him to work there, he was paid and he was allowed to enjoy their meals.

He was never seen in the company of his older brother, though only a year separated them. The older brother was a biological child; the couple had decided soon after his birth that they would adopt a child, a handicapped child whom they would be giving an opportunity in life and at the same time providing a companion for their own child. It never quite worked out that way. The boys recognized little in common with one another.

Eventually both boys left the house to strike out on their own after attending courses at Algonquin College.  The older boy tried a succession of management-level jobs, but found he was unable to retain employment, while the younger one was given employment at special agencies formed for that purpose. Each had their own apartments. Even so, living independently in an apartment not far from his family home, the younger boy needed his father and mother to be involved in his management. Anything that was complex -- any paperwork, bill paying, income taxes, banking, doctors' appointments -- was accomplished by his father, by that time approaching retirement. But he was independent, employed, and living on his own.

The older son repeatedly moved back home with his parents whenever there was a gap in his employment, until the next job came along and he felt secure enough to move on.

When the boys were still young, the parents thought that care of a pet would bring them together in companionship, sharing the pet and looking after its needs. They brought a little dog into the house, whom the older boy ignored and the younger boy became fond of, but the parents did the work of caring for it. Then just as they did with the introduction of the adopted son, they decided to bring another little dog into the house, as a companion to the first, neglected one.

The little dogs were delightful and delighted to be together. They were seldom taken out for walks since both parents worked and time was short, looking after the needs of the younger boy. In the fullness of time, the dogs are both now long gone.

The younger boy lives on his own, quite content with his lot in life, successful in being able to look after his own immediate needs, with the help of his father whose routine has been to look after anything requiring full cerebral capacity on behalf of his adopted son. And the older son has just started a new job that seems quite promising. He lives at home still, until he can be certain he will once again be fully self-supporting.

There's a certain degree of irony there. Just as well none of us can know what the future holds. Certainly our neighbour might never have conceived of a future time when he and his wife felt they had little option but to invite her mother to move in with them, since she was no longer able to look after herself adequately. Now, every time his mother-in-law gets in her car, he winces, noticing how incapable she is of judging space and manoeuvring her vehicle properly.

So then, the prospect for additional snow alerts us to the fact that though we think the 28 cm. that fell on Sunday made quite an impact on the already significant snowpack we have acquired this winter, we're nowhere near what we will obviously end up with at the conclusion of the snowfall season, a month and a half distant.

The canopy over the deck in the backyard is once again well covered with snow. But then, so is every other outdoor surface. The garden sheds resemble mushrooms in the height of the snow on their roofs. House roofs have a burden of snow leaning over the roofs themselves.

And the sky, before noon, looks more than prepared to loose additional layers of snow. In fact, for the next four days Environment Canada has informed the listening public that we're in store for daily increments of between two and five cm. of new snow. Whoopee!

Our son in British Columbia told us that on Friday he had gone skiing at Mount Seymour while snow was falling heavily. But in Vancouver the snow that had fallen during a spate of unusually (for Vancouver) cold temperatures is finally melting, with the return to normal atmospheric conditions for British Columbia.

And on Monday, declared Family Day, as a February day-off from work, he put on his wet suit and went kayaking for a few hours in the ocean off Vancouver, keeping company with surface-bobbing seals.

I think it is so quaint that in Canada our national weather office of Environment Canada will issue an alert, as it did yesterday, for a "winter storm watch". In Canada, winter storms happen with unsurprising regularity in December, January, February and March. They often begin in November by which time if the cold is unremitting, the winter's worth of snowpack will be launched.

We have even, on occasion, experienced snowfalls in April. Sometimes sizeable ones. And when it snows, it is something to watch indeed. A veil of shimmering white descends. If it is also windy, which it often is, that wind plus the cold will resemble gale-force emphasis when it ploughs through the atmosphere, raking up the accumulated snow on treetops and rooftops, sending it in wide, crazy circles accumulating  throughout the landscape.

We were busy yesterday with the snow, true. The canopy on the deck is now a permanent one. Perhaps not the best of choices we made when we bought it with its permanency in mind. Its infrastructure is sound but instead of a removable canvass top it has a complex stay-in-place metal top. And too late we saw the manufacturer's advice, that it would be best to sweep snow off the metal top if over six inches accumulates.

Given that a week earlier we had snow followed by freezing rain that left a nice thick cap of frozen snow and packed ice on top of the metal canopy, we thought it might be best to remove it, since it, plus the twenty centimetres we had been warned was imminent, might collapse the structure. Out we were, in the raging wind, whipping snow and minus-8 C. temperature yesterday afternoon, my husband on a ladder, reaching over onto the canopy top to chop away at the ice and release the top from its burden.

Just in time for the new snow to take its place. And the day-long snowfall necessitating that the backyard pathways be shovelled clear from time to time to make way for our puppies, and the front walkways as well. By the time we went to bed last night the landscape was heavy with snow. When we awoke in the morning, even more had fallen.

Which meant more shovelling, and more work for that indefatigable snow thrower maneuvered by my husband. Which still left plenty of hand shovelling to be undertaken. So that's us with an additional 20 cm. of snow. This morning's forecast warned the Atlantic Provinces that some areas will be hit by up to 70 cm. of snow. Now that's a winter storm warning to heed.

I still cannot, and likely will never think of my little brother as no longer alive and well. In part that is because, I know, we seldom saw one another. I left my parents' house at age 18, when my husband and I married. Relations between me and my mother in particular were always somewhat fraught to put it mildly, leading to infrequent visits.

When my youngest brother was born, the fourth child in the family, I was already thirteen years old, and in another year's time I would meet my future husband. In his infant years, since I was the oldest child, it fell to me to help my mother with the new baby. I hardly knew whether to feel more proud than put-upon. I recall accompanying my mother on foot to a doctor's office for my baby brother's first medical appointment.

Our family was a poor one, among the many who struggled to get on, in inner-city Toronto. We hadn't a carriage for my brother. My mother, after the medical appointment, had to go on elsewhere. She placed the baby in my arms with instructions to carry him home with me. I wasn't a large child but I was robust enough; even so carrying the baby through street after street, I dimly recall, was a burden.

But taking care of my brother, diapering him, feeding him, minding him, did go a far way in giving me confidence not too many years later, in my ability to more than adequately care for my own children as they entered the world, one after the other in a relatively short space of time. Married for five years by then, their arrival challenged my husband and me to their nurturance, though we found it no challenge to extend our love for one another to three small dependants.

On occasion my brother would visit with us, at age 11, 12, then we eventually saw less of him as he matured and grew into his adulthood. When he graduated from University of Toronto as a biologist he took a teaching position with Dalhousie University and left only when he reached 65 years of age, when he retired, and was given the diagnosis of inoperable stomach cancer. In the years between his graduation, his marriage and his retirement, he would visit on occasion when he was attending a conference, or passing through to another destination.

Which explains why it is that I still cannot fathom that he is dead; we saw one another too infrequently for his absence from life to strike with its finality, since we were effectively absent from one another's lives in the general scheme of the way our lives unfolded. Grief only floods in when I convince myself that his death was real.

Years ago, when my husband decided it was time to replace the flooring in the kitchen, he decided at the same time that he would lay the same floor throughout the hall leading to the laundry room from the kitchen. We had chosen a large, dark ceramic tile; midnight blue with black markings. It's the kind of colourization that our two little black puppies seem to melt into.

They're not particularly photogenic at the best of times, given their black coat, but when they're on the kitchen floor -- or by extension, the floor in the laundry room-cum mud-room, they're often difficult to notice, they blend in so well.

And then there's the issue of their habit of following us about. If one of us has a reason to enter the laundry room, with its door leading to the garage, and another to the side of the house, we occasionally fail to notice that they're directly behind us. And when, automatically closing the door shutting off the laundry room which, with its direct proximity to the garage can tend to be cooler in the winter than the rest of the house, we fail to notice one of them has lingered behind; so either one of them can get shut in. Or out, as it happens.

And that's what happened this morning. We had decided it was past time for both to have their nails clipped. Jillie happened to be handy, and Jackie was nowhere to be seen. I held Jillie in my lap while my husband took up her paws, one after the other, to snip her nails, while she struggled. Neither are amenable to having their paws handled, let alone their nails cut.

I heard Jackie barking, but he often does that when he wants to attract Jillie's attention to have a good run-about in the house, so I paid no particular mind to it. But soon I called him, wondering where he was, since he's never far for any length of time from wherever we happen to be, and there was no response. Sure enough, he had barked to alert us that he was locked out.

And when it was his turn to have his nails clipped, he was even less cooperative than his sister, little imps. You'd think we were amputating their paws, not manicuring their nails, terrorizing the little beggars, although by now you'd also think they'd have accustomed themselves to the routine of the process. On the other hand, our other two little poodles had the very same objections, and were no more helpful when having their paws groomed than their successors.

Often, when we return home from one of our weekly supermarket shopping trips, it occurs to me how wonderful it is to be able to venture out a short distance from our home to find available all manner of whole foodstuffs that will give us the opportunity to enjoy a full range of healthy and nutritious meals. Many Canadians, and others living in this country, likely do not fully appreciate how fortunate we are, along with those of other first-world nations for whom a whole spectrum of food choices is readily available. The cost of acquiring such a deliriously appetizing array of fresh foods remains relatively approachable even by those whose incomes are tight, unlike our own.

We have, though, become accustomed to sharing what we have when we can, to help local food banks in their mission to aid those individuals and families for whom the cost of food creates a financial burden. Most supermarkets routinely place a large receiving bin for the collection of foodstuffs, to be picked up by volunteers operating food banks, for wide distribution to those in need. For us, this weekly exercise in community caring has been a multi-decades-old habit. One we continued when we lived abroad for awhile.

When we return from our shopping, it is with relief and with gratitude for all the reasons above. The choices we are given access to enhances the quality of our lives, as it does for all those who are conscious to how vital it is to our well-being to take these opportunities for granted. Just as communication capabilities have been advanced with technology, so too has the importation of once-only-seasonably-available whole foods, now seen everywhere on market shelves. 

In the large supermarket where we shop, close to our home, there are central aisles set aside for the copious shelving to carry ethnic foods from the Caribbean, from Mexico, from India and China, and the Middle East. Concurrently, when we shop we see people busily engaged in filling their shopping carts whose visible minority status identifies them as immigrants.

This is a reflection in recognition of Canada as a multi-ethnic kaleidoscope of countless  cultures from around the world who chose to make Canada their home. Canada, as a country built on immigration, welcomes them all. And we do our best to live in harmony with one another, perhaps aware of our surface differences, but equally conscious of the fact that we are, after all is said and done, the same. The children are equally beautiful, the opportunities for them to aspire to their hearts' desire equally available. In this we trust.

Apart from the supermarkets, there are small family-owned businesses and specialty shops, and in the summer and fall months farmers' markets. Outdoor markets to access locally-grown agricultural crops are colourful and appealing, and people with discriminating tastes often flock to them, a social occasion as well as a necessity. Yes, we're beyond fortunate.