To the North Pole

I don't usually post from home, but in the last two weeks have been a journey.  I have traveled without leaving home.  I am traveling to another place that only exists in occasional, unusual, memorable years.  It is a land of white landscape, luminous sunsets, blue shadows and buttery afternoon swirls.  The land is transformed by color and shape.  The pathways are few.  They limit where and when you go out and how long you stay there.

 

This magical landscape arrives in a package of swirling snowflakes that fall in unrelenting gusts.  Overnight the world changes into something remembered, but unlike anything ever seen before.  The wind, the temperature, the length of the storm, factor into the outcome.  You consult the weatherman with his charts and data from the previous years.  You look back at your own photos, and compare with your memories.  But you have to be here, now, in order to visit this white world.  

 

Until January 23 there was only the lightest dusting of snow on the ground.  There were no snow photos from Christmas, and we were managing very well.  Since Peter's cardiac bypass operation in December, I was the snow removal person, and I'd hardly moved a muscle.  Until January 27.  Fortunately I found a man with a plow on January 26, and was free to watch the snow swirl all day on the 27^th without panic.  The wind whipped the dry flakes into impressive drifts, and without my snow plowman, I would have been lost.  Instead, I was free to shovel the front walk, and take photos of the neighborhood.

Since then we have had two more storms.  Tomorrow we are expecting a three day event, and my plowman will be my knight in shining armor, once again.