Mather

The first snowstorm of the year was predicted to come during the night. When I awoke at daylight, the world outside my window remained grey, grey, grey.

No, this is not the last canoe ride of the year. With good planning and better luck, that last paddle will come the day before the last bit of ice covers the lake.

Autumn is not an easy time to be living with solar energy. We're lucky to see the sun once a week. The shorter days mean greater demand for lights at night. Too bad we couldn't save all that extra energy we had all summer long.

The hard frost we had in late September made for one of the finest shows of autumn leaves we've ever seen. Thanksgiving Day brought the peak of fall colours to the landscape.

It was not a dark and stormy night. It was merely dark and cloudy. The lake lay calm as glass. So, I was not concerned when friends arrived just after eight on Friday night to visit for the weekend. I crossed the smooth lake under heavy clouds.

The nice thing about really cold days is that they almost come with bright, blue, clear skies. After weeks (or was it months?) of cloudy days, the cold front that blew in a week ago brought sunshine with it.

Indian summer began with a morning of fog. The lake lay still as glass. Fall colours from the birches and red maple mingled with the grey fog, rich hues of yellow, orange and red reached across my view.

Twenty five years ago we lived in a different world. Computers were in their infancy, and we never even dreamed of the internet where we could learn anything in a moment by simply tapping a few keys. Television had just met the VCR.

I never did get that last canoe ride in 2003. I woke up one Monday morning to find that 90 per cent of our lake had frozen over. I couldn't get to the 10 per cent that still had water because the new ice was too thin to drag a canoe.

OK, so you just finished digging out from the third big storm of the winter. You don't really want to read about how wonderful it is to have so much snow.