The Cold Writer's Block of Winter

My production has been down lately, and this is why.

Well, I don't know what the weather is like where you live, but in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, renown for having the most precipitation in the Atlantic provinces, snow is how it goes. This year with an exclamation point.

But I'm still not going to use an exclamation point for emphasis there. You sound crazy when you use exclamation points!

The first snowfalls were a source of amusement. There's two steps down here.

I took to the snow stubbornly, the flab of fall sure to slough off.

This is one of the first storms. It snowed for two days, and then I methodically went after the white stuff with aplomb. Two hours later my neighbor across the road rescued me with his snowblower. I didn't mind.

Most of the time, I never think about living on an island, Newfoundland being the 16th largest island in the world. Then we have poor weather, followed by unseasonal cold, and a failure at the provincial power hub resulting in rolling blackouts, and when I finally get up to the grocery store, this is what's left of the meat section without the ferries being able to cross.

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Meanwhile ... new tenants were coming to live in the apartment downstairs, and it was up to me to shovel their driveway before they arrived.

At the end of the first day, and 10cm of snow still falling ...

They make kind of a creepy flipbook.

But it had to be done ...

It was made more difficult by the guy my neighbor hires to do his driveway snow-blowing his snow up into this driveway, EVEN AS I WAS SHOVELING IT. I flagged him down and told him to stop. He said, "Nobody parks there."

And then made more difficult when I got to where the industrial snowblower had widened the streets and had piled the snow at the end. That's why it looks like a huge piece of cake there. It was solid ice, and peeled away like flakes of glass.

Feeling bad for his hired man's complicity in my labor, my elderly neighbor offered me the use of his snowblower, but it only would have chopped itself to pieces on the ice.

Until finally ...

Grocery bags for scale.

A buddy came over and helped me move the last ton or so.

And that's winter, my writer's block.