A White Christmas in Oxford Station

Last week in eastern Ontario we were hearing from Environment Canada that there might be a green Christmas in this part of the country this year. Over the last two days, however, Mother Nature has delivered a stiff rebuttal to those computer-generated predictions with a heavy snowfall.

I took a break from shovelling out my 150-ft. driveway to take this picture of a pickup truck crawling down the road toward me. I had time to walk back up the driveway and take several more pictures before the truck passed. Driving conditions were hardly optimum, to say the least.

The black dot in the middle of the photo on the right is my border collie, who made a beeline for the back trail, hoping we would go for a walk in the forest. Not a chance: I knew the work that lay ahead of me.

After taking these photos, I tried unsuccessfully to start my snowblower, which is a year old. Perhaps mice have built a nest inside the engine, I don't know. At least it would be good for something. Instead, I grabbed my plastic scoop, which works every time I pick it up, and spent a couple hours clearing the snow, which was wet and heavy.

The snow kept coming down, and continued through the night and into the morning yesterday. Because it was wet snow falling on top of a coating of freezing rain, it made the tree branches very heavy. I have a number of birch trees in the yard that will probably have to come down if the caked snow stays on them much longer, because they'll be permanently stooped over to the point that you can't walk beneath them.  Too bad, because I love the birches, but they grow like weeds around here and will soon be replaced. Which reminds me, the local Walmart was selling bundles of three four-foot birch poles for $15 each. Given the amount of birches I have on my property, I figure I must be sitting on a million dollars worth of wood!

Needless to say, there was no time during most of the day to get any work done on the next Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel, which I'm currently researching. Once I came in I was pretty much exhausted, but it was a pleasant fatigue, because there's no prettier sight than winter in Canada when the snow is new and the world seems to have taken on a whiteness that makes everything that much brighter.