All across the country for the past month, we’ve read about and commiserated with those suffering the Winter weather woes in other states, so I guess we were overdue. Well, this weather looks like a blizzard, yet it can’t be called a Winter storm (not technically anyway), so I guess we’ll just call it “The Big Snow of Fall 2013”. I ventured outside early to get the mail and check on the furnace pipe to ensure it wasn’t blocked up from the sideways snow and possibly run the car in the garage for a quick minute. The snow had drifted and was banked up high in front of the garage so I dismissed that chore. Then I got soaking wet from the three-minute excursion around the house. I guess if you’re a Winter enthusiast or a kid eyeballing the snow to make a snowman or snow angels, this is your kind of day. If you have some snowshoes to get around, it might not be so bad either since it sounds like the roads are treacherous. The neighborhood is still humming with the sound of snow blowers as I write this post. When I last looked, the snow in front of the house was still softly falling and looked very pretty, those pristine white crystals as-yet untouched by a passing dog, street dirt and salt kicked up by the City snow plow, or littered by dark purple plum tree leaves that are still wiggling in the wind, anxious to be freed from my neighbor Marge’s tree. When I was growing up, I lived in Oakville, Ontario, so close to Toronto’s Snowbelt that our Winters were very harsh and oh-so-snowy. We lived on the “bend” in the cul-de-sac and a snowy day and night like this one would bury my father’s VW Beetle until you could barely see the domed top. Somewhere in my photo albums are black and white photos of members of our family standing next to what looks like an igloo.

Well, Mother Nature … the special effects have been grand, but now would you please turn the snow globe right-side-up?