In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book The Long Winter, Pa tells his family what he heard from an Indian in the General Store,

“..that every seventh winter was a hard winter and that at the end of three times seven years came the hardest of all.”

We are wondering whether we are in for a Long Winter here as we don’t remember having had this much snow by mid December in the the seven winters we have spent here. On Saturday night the snow started falling and continued until Sunday evening leaving us with another 37cm. Last night there was more so we are well over half a metre.

Remember how the picnic table looked:

This is how it looks now:

While it was snowing on Sunday afternoon we shoveled twice but before I went to bed I looked out to see if the plough had been by.  There was a big wall of snow and ice to clear before either of us could get a car out. You can imagine how pleased we were the next morning to see that our neighbour across the road had cleared an opening in the “wall” for us with his snowblower.

The task of clearing the road goes on throughout the storm and for days after. Once the roads are clear the paths and bus stops need to be done. Eventually the ploughs and giant snowblowers come back along the streets cutting into the snowbanks and blowing snow into large dump trucks to be carted to the snow dump! Snowbanks along the side of the road make the road narrower and when they are higher than the cars, as they are now, visibility at corners gets a little tricky.

It was actually a couple of weeks ago now when we had our first snowfall. It came on a Wednesday, I know this because on the Tuesday night before it came all of us were out in the backyard, in the dark, with rakes and bags, getting the last of the leaves up. We had 40 yard bags full of leaves and pine needles lined up in front of our house ready for the last collection of green waste. Wednesday morning everything was covered in a few inches of snow.

The first two pictures below are taken from my back door today. We have now had two big snow storms and we have well over a foot of snow. Everything looks beautiful but I will have to venture a little further than my back door and try to get some better photos.

Below is the view from my front door, in the last picture you can see the snow banks either side of our driveway. It took all of us quite some time to get all that shoveled up. But we are not complaining. We didn’t have snow stay on the ground last year until mid January, so our chances of a white Christmas this year are looking a lot better.