Chilling Finery

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is MISCHIEF

I’ve mentioned that we received several heavy snowfalls in December. Some of the drifts across our back yard/garden area, places where wind tunnels go around our tree trunks, would measure maybe 1.5 metres deep. On the open lawn maybe .5m or so. Snow much like we were getting about ten years back. And we’ll gladly take every flake of it.

Old times say prairie weather goes in about ten-year cycles. The worst and most famous of these was the “dirty 30’s” but there have been years of abundant rainfall followed by years of hardly any. Around 2000 folks here were meeting at church to pray for much-needed rain. From about 2005 to 2015 we had enough, sometimes an overdose, of precipitation. Old times said they’d never seen the sloughs so full–half-over the roads in some cases. Since then we’ve been winding down to drier years.

What seems more unusual to me is the fog and frost we’ve been having this past week. Rarely is the weather this mild and this humid for this long–and so wind-less!–in January. Every night the trees capture a new coat of hoary whiteness. We wake up to a newly whitewashed world, and trees are slow to shed this loveliness because of our amazing lack of strong winds.

And what does this have to do with MISCHIEF?

I wasn’t able to fall asleep Sat night, so was up in my recliner about 2:15am when the power went out. the moon was giving enough light that I found my way to the flashlight we keep on the kitchen counter, and went to bed. In the morning we saw that the power had been our for 3.5 hours. It was out for an hour Sunday morning while we were in church, then again Sunday afternoon for several more hours. One town not so far away had no power from about 2-7 pm. The cause: broken branches.

Frost may look delicate, but you can see from the picture below how this gentle coating can weigh down tree branches, which may break and come down on a nearby power line.