Little frozen icey thngs

The promised snow has come. Snow muted the morning, except for the starlings that arrived to mangle the suet feeders, the day was quiet. The cardinals buffed their beaks and readied their feathers, they know how fantastic they look in this background. It isn’t a lot of snow that we got today, but it changes the world. After lunch I was watching my neighbor and her son, this is his first snowfall he can walk in and he was not having any of it. I don’t know what the problem was but he was not happy. Later I saw him out with his father and it was the same thing, his stayed where the snow wasn’t. What I wanted to see was his dad fall over into the snow and make a snow angel, get the weirdness all over him, and really indulge in it.

When I was growing up in Eastern Oregon, we had some wicked winters, below zero for weeks, six, seven-foot drifts around the house and barns. School closed for an entire week one winter. But my Aunt drove from their place to ours (8 or 9 miles) so she could get out of the house and my cousins could run off some of their energy. It was a busy day of snow cave building, sliding on the frozen irrigation ditch, snow ball fights and sledding. The old mare, Patty, pulled a sled a bit too. We were sustained by gallons of cocoa and hot soup.

      

We had one really good, or really bad (depending on your views), winter while we were in Klamath Falls. A lot of snow days for the schools and closures for roof damage around town. We had clean to our roof too. We lived 13 miles out of Klamath Falls, down in a little valley between two ridges and we got more snow typically than in town. The snow was so deep we had to make paths and potty areas for the dogs. The best workout in the world is cutting through four feet of snow to make trails and clearing a pretty long driveway, a lot of leg and arm work. Ooh rah!