Well here I am in February and realising I haven’t written anything here since November, very odd.  A combination of blog hosting problems, winter and my laptop being out of commission has made writing tricky.  But now, I have returned.

So what’s up?

Here it’s snowing.  It’s been snowing for a while and will probably continue to snow for a bit longer; it’s winter after all and we know that we have a few weeks ahead of us here in Canadaland.  We make the best of it, skating on the frozen canal, enjoying the stunning sunsets and cuddling up on the sofa during the long, dark hours of the evening. It’s not so bad.

Actually, it’s pretty good.

For the first time the winter doesn’t seem to feel as oppressive as it has in the past.  I think this has something to do with the fact that it isn’t -47C like it was last year, the temperatures this year have been much more ‘normal’ for the time of year.  -27C I grant you, but not quite the bone shattering cold of the winter gone by. We’re not milking a cow this winter (and by ‘we’ I mean Stephen) which has helped keep us above the line marked ‘Deep Winter Despair’ and more in the zone of ‘Looking Forward to Spring’.

This year, as promised, we’ve stuck to our plan for keeping koselig.  After the joy of a Christmas break we decided not to take down our tree, the lights are so warm and pleasant in the evening; instead we redecorated it, a new colour scheme of green and gold to warm us and remind us of the coming spring.  I have plans to redecorate for the equinox, an egg covered tree could be quite the thing.

Perhaps it’s the tree, perhaps it’s our plan to not exhaust ourselves this winter, perhaps it’s the delayed snow that gave us a balmy and mostly green December, but this year has been different.

And today, in the midst of what appears to be winter, but my soul tells me is the beginning of spring somewhere deep beneath our feet, is our 20th Anniversary.  Not a wedding anniversary as we never quite got round to getting married (all the living got in the way) but of when we decided that we were officially together.  20 years ago, just babies we were, just beginning this mad journey together.  There is no way we could have predicted where we would be now, we’d have thought you were insane if you’d have told us.

Truth be told I think we’re a bit bonkers now, doing what we do, making life just plain hard for ourselves a lot of the time.  Growing food when we could just buy it, homeschooling when we could pop them on the bus, making when we could just head to the shops.  But that doesn’t seem to be the way we do things.  Somehow, on this 2 decade journey we stopped being just ourselves with our own wants, plans and desires.  We became ‘us’, the two of us and then the four of us; with the animals included it’s about the 51 of us, all needing something from each other, all giving something in return.

I often wonder where we are going, where the next decades will take us.  Given how far we’ve come in the last 2, I might be past the point of surprise on that one.  But then knowing the utterly insane, utterly inspired, utterly wonderful chap I’ve hitched my wagon to, I might just refrain from placing actual money on it.