Mather

The biggest snowstorm of the century hit last weekend. Twenty-four hours after the first cool flake came drifting down, I stepped outside for a little walk. Hush, hush, my footsteps shuffled through the foot-deep snow. More snow was falling.

Beavers rarely get out from below the ice in winter. But the couple of warm spells we've had this month have given them a chance to poke their way out near shore.

Sitting here in my little log cabin in the Northern Ontario wilderness… listening to CBC Radio. Slowly over the past week, it has occurred to me that I haven't heard any Conservative "paid political advertisements" on my local station. Hmmm.

The little owl was very hard to see in the midst of the skinny spruce trees. I only knew it was there because we had visitors, and one of them had spotted the saw whet owl in the trees just behind the cabin.

Only one more week until Christmas.

April is maple sugar month in the north. Our sugarbush grows about two kilometres south of our little log cabin in the woods. I'm up early, just as the first rays of the sun begin to touch the tips of the trees.

Lots of people are obsessed with their lawns.  For some reason, they feel there shouldn't be anything but grass growing there.

The first day the ice formed at the edge of the lake, it was about three centimetres thick. Then it snowed just a bit. As the ice stretched and adjusted to its place on the lake surface, it groaned and cracked.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization is recommending deep rock burial for the highly radioactive waste that has been gathering in Canada for decades.

No road comes to my house. No driveway, no sidewalk. My truck is parked seven-kilometres away, across the lake in summer, at the end of a forest trail in winter. I love it this way.