let it snow... almost three feet worth of it... (in some places)

As a relative newbie to the North, I just spent the last three days in awe as it snowed for three days straight... and we now have 25 centimetres worth of the white stuff.

It started on Friday morning. When we woke up, the ground was covered in a light dusting. But it kept coming down and kept coming down... cars and trucks are driving off the road into ditches as if suddenly being yanked on by an invisible string. It really looks like that. You could be driving on the highway behind someone, and wham! there they are in the ditch... My editor was all keen on my getting out there and snapping photos. I wasn't too keen. A) I don't have any experience in winter driving and B) our car didn't have snow tires on it. I wasn't about to add myself to the casualty list... I got someone else to drive in their big, sturdy, winterized SUV and we went out together. "This is a lot of snow," I say.

Friday night, and it's still coming down. M and I settle in for a cosy evening of watching a movie cuddled on the couch. I am thankful for our warm house and sturdy windows. "This is an insane amount of snow," I say, peering out the window. We are one of the lucky ones in town that keep our power.

Saturday morning. We are snowed in. The snow comes up past my knees in our yard. In our driveway, it's up the wheels of our CRV. That is a lot of snow. You would think, Houston being a northern town, that they are ready for winter weather. They are not as ready as they should be. Our road is not plowed, the three main roads in town are not plowed. My husband, who is a keener, wants to go to work. I should be going to work, but I know the Halloween pumpkin events that are planned for the day are cancelled.

So we started shovelling our driveway. Or should I say M shovels the driveway and I try to get the snow off of our car with a broom. The snow is the thick and heavy kind - so thick and heavy that I almost break the broom!

Wouldn't you know that we get stuck three feet away from our driveway. I tell M, "We should just stay at home. This is crazy. It's still snowing." But he persists. We get stuck again at an intersection down the street. I say the same thing to him. None of the roads are plowed, no one is around and it's now 9:45 in the morning. We finally get free again and make it to his work. He decides, after all we went through to get there, that he's not going to open up shop.

The whole town is closed down - the only thing open downtown is Home Hardware, selling out of snow shovels. The grocery store and a few other stores in the mall are open, but no one is shopping. Everyone is stuck at home.

So at my office I sent my editor the pictures I took of the sorry souls in the ditch. I'm going home. It's cold, it's still snowy, and it looks like there's no end in sight. On Saturday afternoon, both M and I are at home and we feel this desire to set up our Christmas tree and all the rest of the decorations. And it's not even December. We take turns walking up to our big living room window and gazing at the curtain of flakes coming down. We have never seen this much snow.

It finally stopped snowing sometime late Saturday afternoon. We kind of shook ourselves out of this stupor. But even if we wanted to go somewhere, we couldn't. But we wanted to anyways, so we went to my brother- and sister-in-law's place to watch a movie. We couldn't stop talking about the snow and how much there was of it. Having lived here a long time, they were cool about it.

Sunday morning: the sun is shining brilliantly. We finally have blue, blue sky - that icy blue that makes me think diamonds should be that colour. They've finally paved our road, Yay! We still have power, Yay! and seeing as it didn't snow after M shovelled the driveway the night before, we don't have to shovel it again, Yay! We're still kind of cold-weather wimps, so instead of frolicking in the snow like all the other Northerners, we stayed inside and watched the Chronicles of Narnia. It was a good day.

Today I interviewed some hunters who were stranded out in the bush all weekend, and only escaped by breaking into a bulldozer parked along the road and ploughing all their way back to Houston. It was a family with three kids, one of whom has cerebral palsy. As they tried to drive along in the bush they came across other people who were stuck. One of them had a satellite phone to call the RCMP but found out it would have been today or Tuesday before anyone would come for them. That's when they decided to borrow the bulldozer. There were stuck since Friday and they came into town Sunday night. What a story.

I don't know how much more snow we could get. I think we've got our whole winter's worth of snow in one weekend before Halloween is even here.

But I could be wrong.

As I write this on Monday afternoon, it is cloudy.