When a cold, raw day like December 9, 2014, keeps me inside, it often sets off some memories. I spent sixteen years living in Canada and for twelve of those years I worked outside every day. Much of what I remember has to do with cold weather.
There were some memorable cold days. One was the day I had the wrong end of the bale conveyor for a huge load of straw. The wrong end of the conveyor is the barn end where you have to grab the bale and also stack it before the next one arrives. That particular day it was minus 28F and the steam coming off of me frosted every hair on my head and my eyebrows. I looked like the abominable snowman. It was long ago and I had a lot more hair on my head.
I worked outside in weather as cold as minus 40F. You were very careful when you did that but on a farm with close to two hundred animals, you cannot take a day off so you just get used to it.
The worst cold was when you got wet from the inside and the outside. One of the most miserable days each year was when we weaned the calves from their mothers and weighed them. It was usually early November before the ground had frozen so most of the day was spent running around in mud. A cold rain could add to the misery since you were likely already damp from the exertion of chasing 600 pound calves. The positive memory from this revovles around easing myself into a hot tub at the end of the day after Glenda made me undress on the porch.
While those were days of personal discomfort, there were plenty of days that spread the misery across all the inhabitants of the Maritimes. When I saw the warning issued for parts of New Brunswick for December 10, I could not help but remember a few of those icy times.
A developing low pressure system will continue to approach the area tonight. Snow heavy at times mixed with freezing rain will develop this evening and continue on Wednesday. Precipitation will change to freezing rain Wednesday morning and to heavy rain Wednesday afternoon. A total of 25 to 45 centimeters of snow, several hours of freezing rain, and up to 45 millimeters of rain are expected by Thursday morning.
Life will be even nastier than this warning since this storm will quickly pull some cold air into the area and the forty-eight hours of slightly above freezing weather (35F) will soon be followed by plunging temperatures. It will be 24F Friday night, then 22F on Saturday night. Then the temperature will stay below freezing until it bottoms out at minus 3F on Tuesday, December 16. The forecast that I am looking at does not go far enough to know when the temperature will get above freezing next.
The net result of all this is lots of ice and sometimes it hangs around the rest of the winter. It is especially tricky when you get snow on top of what will become rock hard ice. One of my posts at my blog, The Canada I miss, deals with all that fun including how our children used to skate in our driveway while waiting for the bus.
I hope my Canadian friends do not get so much rain that they lose their snow. As most folks who have lived in the north will tell you, snow drifts around your home make it warmer. We used to cut spruce boughs and place them around our foundation to help catch the snow.
Winter is something that you take in stride if you live in Canada, but you will still remember some of the cold that you face. The icicles are ones that found me in 1971, during my first winter in Nova Scotia when I saw plenty of snowstorms that turned to sleet then went to rain only to go back to snow.