Birds of Winter

The birds of winter are back.

The snow came earlier than I had expected this year, but we've had it easy these last few years and it is about time we got back to the normal Michigan winters where the snow comes in November and doesn't leave til April (or May).

Those first few years, we did a lot of shoveling in a vain attempt to keep some semblance of normality in our day-to-day travels. Keeping the driveway clear so we didn't slip and fall on our duffs.  Even bought one of those fancy-dancy "snow-blowers" (although technically it's a "snow-thrower") so we could keep up with the Joneses. But they aren't quite as useful as we had hoped.  For one, they're extremely loud. And the 2-cycle engines are horribly inefficient. And they put out horrid exhaust fumes. And they can only be used on fresh powdery snow at temperatures below freezing. You can try to use them on packed or wet snow, but you're just asking for trouble. They really aren't built for handling anything heavier (or firmer) than powder. Leastways our cheap Home Depot special isn't.

Now we take it as it comes. Manually. Shoveling a bit here and a bit here, throwing sand out to give us some extra traction. Avoiding salt if we can (because of the rapid oxidation of car metal in the presence of salts). Wearing good boots. And avoiding unnecessary travel.

So we spend our days mostly sitting in the nice warm family room and looking through the windows at the birds out in the trees as they try to locate something to eat in the desolate landscape. The trees still have a lot of fruit on them from the autumn. But that won't last long. Another couple of weeks and the squirrels and birds will have the trees emptied of nearly everything. Then the deer will come along and nibble on the lower branches.