Snow and Time

It started to snow over a week ago. First there was a thin layer over everything and everyone said it would soon melt, but then there came snow storms so heavy I couldn't see a thing when driving home in the dark. Pretty soon everything was covered, the car was frozen shut and difficult to extricate from the driveway, we saw other people's cars in the ditches on the way to work and everybody started wearing their winter boots again.

The view from our porch now

After the first batch of snow

In this part of the world my relationship with the seasons is turned on its head. In England I love the autumn but fear the winter. Here the winter seems like the natural state of things and the summer a weird hiatus. Already the moon is massive in the sky, even in the daytime, and the landscape glows in a dark blue colour all night. As many challenges as the ice and frost bring, I'm glad that I'll be here for another winter cycle.

There are no street lights where we live now. To get to our house you have to leave the road and walk down a small hill to the waterside. If we don't leave the lights on it can be difficult spot our home in amongst the trees.

In other news, today is my birthday. That means it's one year since the events I talked about in the first post here on this blog, and very soon it will be a year since we moved here. If I think back to those days before we set off on this trip it feels like a lifetime ago. I think one way to make life seem a little less short is to make sure a lot happens between one birthday and the next.