Growing up in New Brunswick, Canada, we didn't get as much snow as parts further inland, but it wasn't unusual to have twelve inches at once. It normally started snowing around Halloween, and I can remember more than once having the remnants of drifts hanging around behind the house until early May. In the middle of the winter it got below -40F a couple of times. We actually had a mercury thermometer freeze, which I've never seen since...

Two months later, of course, it could break 100 deg F!

One year we had a very heavy snowfall, perhaps sixteen inches or so, which took about two days solid, and it was blowing a gale at the time, gusting to over 50MPH. When it stopped the windward side of the house (on which lay my bedroom on the second floor) was covered with one huge drift halfway to the roof. It was a good twenty feet deep.

My father opened the front door about half past six in the morning, which was on the OTHER side of the house, mind you, to find there was a perfect imprint of the door in a huge snow bank, some eight feet or so deep at the house, which completely covered the garden, driveway, and car. The wind must have changed direction for a few hours in the night.

When he stopped laughing he had to fill the front porch with snow, as there was nowhere else to put it, to dig out to the driveway where it went down to only five feet deep. Then, when he finally had a four foot wide passage to the outside, he had to transfer all the snow from the porch, which luckily was unheated so it didn't all melt, back outside. Which all in took another two days.

Even though the roads were plowed by the afternoon even on the outskirts of the town where we were, we couldn't get the car out for a week. It took a day to find it, two more days to dig the driveway out, then, of course, we were faced with a twenty-five foot bank of snow and ice which the plow had helpfully pushed off the road onto the verges, including across everyone's driveways...

That took some effort to shift.

I still had to go to school, since the heating was actually working which seemed to be the only allowable excuse to close the place if it failed. I had to climb out my bedroom windows with snowshoes and walk, easy enough since it was now a two foot drop and only a mile in a straight line, which was easily possible under the circumstances.

Happy days of childhood

Glad I wasn't an adult at the time, I could play in the stuff rather than try to move it!

Of course, living in the UK as I do now, it always amuses me when we get about a quarter of an inch of snow and the entire country panics and grinds to a halt. Assuming it snows at all which it very rarely does in Somerset these days. It went a good ten years with no snow at all.

pca