Wednesday 23 February 2011

Piling snow up high

For a long, long time many things have been prioritized in my life before this Blog of mine, but I have often during this time thought about what I wanted to blog about. I have had many ideas but never actually sat down to write anything.

Sometime ago, last spring I think it was, I even thought I would be back, but then never got round to it. But as so many people still seem to visit here, I made a resolution to myself, to blog at least once a month about something, anything. And maybe in time, as I did from the beginning, I might get caught in the wind and do it more often.

Anyway, yesterday, actually…I found myself once again wondering about the meaning of things. This year we have had exceptionally more snow than usual, I mean now during the time I have lived in Finland. And very cold weather for a very long period. Snow arrived earlier than any other year, way before Xmas last year and has stayed with us since. So getting to the point now, as more snow falls down from the sky, more snow piles up. Well, this has of course to be cleaned away but still the snow tends to pile up without us noticing it with sometimes inches of ice below our feet on top of the pavement and asphalt.

The snow that gets cleaned away from streets and pavements has to be dumped somewhere and this seems to be big trouble. Cities have special snow dumps and I know that the city of Helsinki for instance dumps lots of their snow in the sea. I am not here going tell you my opinion about this, you might read it in between the lines, and this was not really my point, but slowly trying to target in on it.

Yesterday, as I said, they had two big wheel loaders scraping off all the ice both our back and front yard. There were inches and inches of thick ice and they scraped it all off the asphalt so the surface of it was visible for the moment it took for it to get covered by the new snow falling on top of it and covering it.

Now to the point, the removed snow and ice was piled up on outside the asphalt. They actually went on all day with it. Big, huge 4 to 5 meters high piles with ice and they had to be dumped somewhere, but that is on the lawn where they dumped it. And where the bushes and shrubs are in the summertime and big piles of ice take months to melt. Loads of snow to melt an turn into water, watering the lawn that gets all soggy and wets it up, never dries up and smells like it does in the spring and to the enjoyment of us all, what in the winter is covered in snow well be coming out in thaw in the spring and we all know what that is, what a joy to look forward to. The smell.