Damn! It's Cold Out

The bitterly cold wind bit at the exposed flesh of our faces as we made our way up the street this morning. Not as cold as yesterday, but still at minus 45 degrees celsius with a stiff wind there's little encouragement to enjoy this extreme of winter weather. Yesterday's stiff winds which brought the wind-chill temperature to minus 39 degrees brought down lots of bits and pieces of branches and dead boughs from the woods offset from the street.

As we enter the slender greenspace leading from the street to the entrance to the ravine we note the new piles of thick slivers littering the snow-packed ground and look at the trunk of a pine tree, low to the ground where a Pileated woodpecker is convinced his new larder is located. Oddly enough, it isn't a Pileated we hear as we tread forward, but a Hairy woodpecker, unseen, its cartoon call unmistakable overhead. We begin the first long descent, our boots biting into the snow, crunching, crunching.

I'm wearing cleats over my boots. Previous days' light snowfalls have been kind of dry, causing me to relate to Sisyphus as every step forward resulted in a slip backward. It's irritating, necessitating far more vigorous effort in a constant attempt to gain ground and after awhile it becomes dreadfully tiring. With the cleats I'm not given to slipping. My husband's boots don't present that problem and that's odd, since both our boots are soled with live rubber.

Button and Riley are doing their own slipping and sliding. Not too dreadfully but a nuisance for them too, I'm sure; making them work harder than usual to advance uphill. For them the problem is the small leather pads I've sewn to mimic their own, on the fleecy-sided boots I made for them. But there's no help for it, they've got to wear the boots otherwise their feet cramp up from the intense cold. And, small as they are, they're too heavy for us to continually lift them for relief from the cold. So boots it is.

When we reach the top of a long ascent we sometimes have to offer an encouraging little push on their back-ends to get them all the way to the top because of slippage, but we manage. On the way up the first ascent I look up and note that the high winds have finally brought down that thick dead bough that our son called a 'widow-maker', but I can't see it anywhere on the slope below.

As we make our way along the spine of the ravine where it slopes off on either side we're slightly more exposed and the wind whips at us. I seldom use the hood of my down-filled jacket, preferring a bright-coloured woollen head band but now I realize there is too much heat escaping and too much cold impacting and up comes that hood. At a distance I see someone approaching with a large black dog and I hesitate.

It's the Russian woman who comes to visit her son and daughter-in-law for prolonged periods, helping to look after her two little granddaughters. With her is the large Doberman Pinscher we've seen her with a few times. We're wary of that dog, it has an oddly sinister visage, augmented by its full muzzle harness, its body harness, its muscularity. We watch and wait as she calls to the dog, stops to click its leash onto its harness, then move forward again.

As I pass her I smile and thank her for her thoughtfulness. She nods. My husband has picked up little Riley, trying to hush his hysterical yapping. I turn and encourage Button to pass the woman and her dog, positioned now just off the path in untrodden snow. Uncharacterisically, Button hesitates, moves tentatively forward, then stops again, obviously a little fearful. The large dog emits no sound, there's no struggle to surge forward, it's obedient as the woman holds it at short leash.

Finally Button summons sufficient courage to dash forward toward me and by that time my husband has caught up and is abreast of the woman. She imitates Riley with a high-pitched chattering, her derision-filled voice trailing after us. When my husband used to await our grandchild's arrival home on the school bus and she waited there too for her older grandchild she always ignored his smiles of greeting, would repeat "no English!" if he tried to engage her.

As we turn the corner where the trail loops there's the song of a cardinal, and we're amazed that it's out in this kind of weather, not huddled up somewhere to conserve warmth and energy. No squirrels to be seen anywhere this day, rushing up tree trunks, skittering across the snow. Semi-hibernation kicks in around this time of frigid intensity. But the landscape surrounding us is beautiful. Snow blankets the ground and some still lingers in the evergreens.

The stand of immature hornbeam still proudly hoist aloft their pale brown autumn leaves, a modest bit of colour in this white-and-dark landscape. Further on there are also leaves left on beech trees, and as we approach a broad semi-meadowed area there are the dry remnants of fall's white asters defiant against the whipping wind, the snow, the cold.
The creek has now frozen over completely. Snow sits regally on the frozen water.

As we make our way back up the last of the long sloping ascents toward the street again, we hear the hairy woodpecker fast at work, and finally locate him close to the top of a poplar.