Life in Nova Scotia
My friend grew up in Ontario, but has lived in Nova Scotia for 10 years.
“I miss summer!” she said. “Where’s the heat?”
I thought about it, then laughed.
“I grew up in Nova Scotia,” I said, “and to me, summer is when you don’t have to put a coat on to go outside. When you aren’t fighting the temperature. When you don’t have to hide indoors. When you can embrace nature and it embraces you.”
It was her turn to laugh. “For you, summer is just when it isn’t winter!”
The storm predicted by the red sunrise in my last post has passed, leaving the world cleansed and transformed.
And so the shoveling begins. We have about 3-4 inches of very dense snow here near Western Shore on the shore of Mahone Bay. A friend near New Germany, inland, reports at least a foot and a half of “thick heavy snow”. Meanwhile, someone in Kingsburg, which juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, has no snow at all! This pattern is typical: rain near the coast, snow inland.
Here’s how a tidal inlet on Mahone Bay looked this morning:
… I think. At least the sun has come out as the temperatures dive well below freezing. After several days of hovering around the 0°C mark, the sun rose to -14°C. Time for a walk.
It has been raining for weeks now, it seems. A quasi-stationary low has delivered warm, moist air to the South Shore on an ongoing basis.
Lunenburg is still picturesque through the fog. You get a new appreciation for why the buildings are so brightly painted. It’s a cool place to hang out.
… stick around for 20 minutes. That’s what they say. I got anecdotal proof of it today. Driving into Mahone Bay at about 8:10, I saw this:
Then about 20 minutes later, this is what I saw in the same spot:
Case closed.
The powerful north winds of the storm earlier in the week pinned the ice to the shore, even while driving cracks into it. Now there is no wind, and much of the ice that we walked on in January seems poised to float out to sea. What will it take for it to leave? A south wind? Repeated tides?
The sea ice nearby is keeping the temperature down in our yard. Much of it is still covered with snow and ice, while up the road, further away from the water, the ground is bare. It has been a hard, icy winter. So I’ll be glad to see the sea ice go.
There was a soft dusting of snow on everything on Sunday (above). Then on Tuesday came the biggest snowstorm of the season so far. Schools were closed 2 days in a row. In a storm like that, I feel I’m in a time warp – life seems suspended somehow, even though I was in my usual place in my home office, and the power stayed on, and the internet offered my usual window on the world. Surrounded by the energy of weather, it felt like the inside of a cocoon.