Snowfall

... the view from the the roadside window...

I had the chance to shovel the snow on my deck last week.

Glen and Janet came over and helped me the first time I tried to clean it off.

I can tell how much snow there is, when the TV reception stops working because there is too much ice on the satellite. My plan was to take small shovelfuls of snow and toss it all over the railing. Quite a relief, really, when Glen came over and took out some of the panels on the railing – so I devised a new plan which was how to figure out which grids of snow should be shovelled out of which panels.

... a freshly shovelled deck ...

I have to say that it was incredibly beautiful out there, too hot to wear my down-filled jacket once I got doing the work.

 First I shed my scarf, then my hat, then my coat and finally the gloves came off.

The temperature hovered around zero, there was no wind and there is a beauty in the cold silence of the forest.

 ... creek water trickles past the rock wall ...

I would not have known there were any animals around but I saw the tracks around the compost.

Hard to believe that after buttressing up the bottoms of the barrels with rocks to prevent the resident raccoon from raiding the compost, I could find its tracks and even the place where it had burrowed under the barrels to pull out everything that is organic – except the onions, which it rejects.

... now how to get those barrel lids off ...

The crows are big enough to knock the tops of the barrels off – oh, not when the snow is 2 feet deep on top of them, and 2 feet deep on the ground, so deep that it makes it difficult for me to trudge  through unshovelled snow to take the compost buckets out – but the crows do manage to knock the tops off.

 I have learned to tighten the lids back on – animals attacking from the top and the bottom.

Yes, compost ... black gold.

Arta >