Back to bit of a traditional great northern winter look after a fair dusting of snow. It looks wintry, but you only get that old time winter feeling when it sticks around for months, with short days of freezing cold. Here, you can still see the grass pushing through. Cosmetic! :)
Weather
Firewood heap
The last pile of firewood, hopefully enough to get through the cold weather. There’s more in another small stack, enough for a week or two, then this. It’s a motley collection, cut further north from here, from the zillion trees felled by that crazy windstorm of three-four years ago and hauled over. Different sizes of tree. Different species, mostly hardwood, but a fair bit of too-fast-burning softwood. Overall well-seasoned, lying around dead for years, and then cut and split early last summer. If it looks like “a lot”, you probably haven’t burned wood as a main heat source, when it’s below freezing day and night, the wood stove eats those big chunks like…bite-sized chocolate bars after Halloween. With the crazy weather, colder cold now seems to come only in spells, a couple days, a week at a time, then back to hovering around zero. We’ll see how the heap holds up!
To winter or not to winter
The snow is clearing pretty quickly. I haven’t checked the weather forecast for the next couple of days. It could go either way: all brown again, or…all white, again! We’ll soon see…
Mushy-squishy
It looks messy in the outdoors. The snow is melting off again, the ground’s still frozen but the surface is mushy grass and squishy mud. Not the most pleasing, pretty picture, but now there’s a hit of real warmth in the air, that feeling you got as a kid waiting for summer. The days are gradually getting longer and the sun, old reliable, is rising higher in the sky!
Winter wonderland for a while
A few hours of steady snowfall blanketed the landscape and we have a magical winter wonderland postcard scene. It may be enough snow to stick around for a while, unless next, it rains!
Firestarter
Wood heat has been the winter way around here for the last few years. The old wood stove, and stacks of firewood. In cold snaps, where it stays well below freezing, day and night, the fire is always burning. In the more usual dramatic temperature ups and downs, the fire is often left to run down overnight, and a new one built up early evening. I’ve become a little obsessed with firestarting using the least amount of paper and kindling, and only one match. I don’t suppose you could call that a skill, nor an art, but some kind of a game! I enjoy setting up for a dominos falling effect, but with fire. The easy-to-light, fast-burning paper lasting long enough to ignite the smallest pieces of longer-burning wood, which in turn start the next larger pieces, the bigger chunks get, the more steady, sustained fire it takes to set them ablaze. Idea for a video game?!
With a little snow
What a difference a little snow makes. Winter has changed around here over the last 20 years, It’s hard to really remember how it was exactly, except that I’m pretty sure there was a lot more snow. And it was a lot colder. Right through the winter months. Nowadays, the snow comes and it goes. The temperature hops up and down. The seasons are still here, you can tell by the sun, but they feel kind of…approximate. That pile of firewood hasn’t yet been stacked, a task for the next warm and snow-free winter day. Or maybe it can wait until spring.