Monday, November 7, 2022

A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER

According to the weatherman, high temps in the Gilbert country will be at or below freezing with lows mostly in the teens for the next ten days. That’s a call to action. We winterized the farmhouse yesterday (Sunday, Nov. 6).

“It seems early,” said brother Chuck.

“It IS early,” I agreed.

Basically, it’s disappointing to have to close the house before Christmas. Time was – and not so very many years ago – we could count on a mild autumn – no prolonged cold snaps anyway, but in recent years we’ve had to winterize the house before Christmas. If we spend Christmas there, we have to open the house and then winterize it again.

It sounds so easy, doesn’t it? – “winterize the house.” Well, it’s quite a routine, and it falls to Mike to do it. The best I can do is to supply him with warm drinks and hot food.

This region experienced high winds last Friday and Saturday, and once again, the old maple tree in the front yard dropped some limbs. Mike removed my big windchimes from one of the limbs to be stored for the winter, thus saving them from possible damage. The tree needs drastic pruning.

There were a few small mounds of snow on the ground, but upon closer inspection, they looked more like sleet. The pond is still low and is already crusted over with ice. Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that we had such warm afternoons? A long cold snap at this time seems unreal.

But -- the Clearwater Mountains are already capped with snow. KW

2 comments:

Hallie said...

Yep! I was wearing shorts just four weeks ago. From shorts to sweaters!

Maybe someone in Orofino would come up to prune that tree.

Kathy said...

No tree service in Orofino. There's one or two in Kamiah. We had that big stump cut down last year, and the best bid was from a service here in the Valley. He brought along a logger friend, and the stump was down in a jiffy. It remains to be seen how we will cope with pruning the maple.