Sepia Saturday 388: Snowy Days

The prompt photo was taken in Halifax, a minster town in the Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale in West Yorkshire, England. 






I borrowed this photo from the City of Winnipeg photo archive to get a rough match for the prompt...a street scene in winter.

The other photos from my albums depict surprises or unusual items in the snow.






The chairs should have been stored for the winter.  The snow-covered Adirondack Chair is a hackneyed image, but one my father took every year to memorialize the snowfall. The two spruce trees in our neighbor's yard looked beautiful covered in snow. Even though in art, groups of three are aesthetically preferred to pairs, I like the twin chairs, twin lilac bushes, and twin trees, snow obscuring some details but highlighting others.

Skiing on the endless flats. The height of optimism is planning to ski on the prairies. Snowshoeing was more suited to the terrain . . . no pesky inclines to slow you down. My sister was a very flexible child as you can see by the way her torso is contorted to face the camera. The poles are too long for her. Later in life when we all relocated to California and took up serious skiing, she was never very good; nor was I. Her son and husband were excellent. We suffered from hesitation and a fear of speed. Observers used to marvel at how slowly we could glide down the slopes.

A government surplus? In the late summer, in this corner of our yard, we pulled tomatoes off the vines and ate them, soaking up the sun. During the winter, snow drifted into that corner. My sister's face is barely visible above a mountain of snow. My father's white pen tells us it's February 20th, 1949. The province was sitting on a mountain of cash. Right about then, they announced a surplus of funds of $4,425,000. They were doing something right.

Should a kid be put outdoors to play in snow piles over his head?My sister's son is dwarfed by the snow piles in this photo. Like all little kids in that era, he's so wrapped up in heavy winter gear, he can barely move. I doubt if he could use his little arms to save himself. Or run onto those little sausage legs.

Pitching a tent in the snow? Poor Canadians. We didn't get much opportunity to pitch a tent without mosquitos—perhaps this was a last-ditch attempt.  The tent was in our neighbor's yard. Winnie, the lady of the house, may have thrown Harry out for the hundredth time and perhaps this was a temporary solution for their marital anguish. As kids, we preferred to build igloos in the snow; I'm sure we sneered at this tent.

And to end on a high note . . . this is me, perched up on a snowbank with my shovel. As a kid, I loved the snow. My father never missed a teaching moment and he must have thought I was ready to learn how to deal with winter's most onerous task—cleaning the sidewalks.