First Snow of Winter

The snow was falling even before we went to bed last night. Not flurries either but the wet, heavy flakes that fall straight down like missiles, sticking to the cold surfaces and piling up like cord wood. From a distance they look like tiny snowballs and up close they clump on face, getting stuck in your eyelashes and bangs before melting into tiny slush pools that dribble slowly down you face and off your chin like drool.

Although it was much colder this morning, the snow clung to most surfaces save the roads. They are still a bit too warm and with the help of the sun, shook off the white stuff this time. Next time will likely be a different matter. Snow in early November is something I can’t recall in the last several years. The last really snowy winter I remember was 1998 when Will and I were first living together. It seemed as though it did nothing but snow that winter. I think we had nearly a week’s worth of school to make up that following June because of the snow days. Here, according to Rob, the snow fell and stayed, foot after foot of it, just before Halloween. I don’t recall snow on Halloween ever but I remember plenty of snowy Novembers growing up and even through my young adulthood. Weather patterns have changed a lot though because of the global warming in the last decade and a bit more. In Iowa winter snows fall around and more often after Christmas and in the southern part of the state significant and lasting snowfall is over by late February or very early March. By late April the warm weather returns and it can be very warm and humid by mid-May and stay that way through to mid-October. Here the snow falls and stays until May.

Everyone is concerned about how I will handle a Canadian winter, but I only just put my long johns on today whereas Rob has been wearing his for weeks already. It’s just snow and cold. The sun being perpetually on the horizon, not that we have fallen back to standard time, is more bothersome. On the way into town today, Rob has me try to picture what it will be like with feets high snow banks on either side of the road and weather so cold that the car exhaust builds up into a fog at the intersections from the waiting vehicles. Not hard to picture the latter at all as I have been paying attention to the smokestacks at the plants around here and the smoky pollution that comes out. It’s thicker and moves languidly up and across the sky. Manufactured clouds of steely gray snaking away for what seems like miles. Rob isn’t far off when he asserts that the cold is visible up here. I used to try and picture the Fort and the road to Josephburg before we moved up from his descriptions. I tried to visualize the layout of the yard and the house. He had shown me how to get to the aerial shot on Goggle Earth once and that helped a bit, but it wasn’t until I got here that it all made sense. Of course, even in the beginning, nothing seemed concrete in the same way life in Des Moines did. Now the Fort is my mailing address and Josephburg is where I live, and this house, is our home in a way that the old place on 53rd Place never was.

Winter has arrived. And so have I.