cincinnatus_c | Da erglänzt in reiner Helle

Currently at Toronto Pearson: 1. High today: 6.

Today we went to see if the cottage is still standing. As L. says, it is always still standing, and so it is:

This was only the second time in my life that I've been up there with snow on the ground (had no idea how much to expect, given that there has been mostly none down here this winter; snow started to appear going up 115, more solidly up 28, and around the cottage it was probably mostly boot-top deep), and that I've walked around on the lake. Given the persistently warm weather and the melting going on today, I was a bit leery of stepping out onto the lake at first, but I quickly discovered that even where the ice was melting around the edges, it was pretty much rock-solid. Eventually we discovered, by shoving sticks down ice-fishing holes--

--that the ice is actually unfathomably thick. Thing is, while it has been as unseasonably warm this winter up there as down here, getting above freezing more often than not this month, the nights up there still get way colder than they do here. The last couple of days the highs have been 2.4 and 2.0 in Bancroft; 2.8 and 4.4 in Toronto. But the lows up there have been -19.1 and -13.6, while they've been -.8.4 and -2.1 down here. I'm not sure it's really possible to skip winter up there like it is down here; at most you can have a winter with something seriously wrong with it. In January and February of 2002, when it never got below -15 in Toronto and only got below -10 on eight days, Bancroft went below -18 on sixteen days (and another five in March).

Of course, one of my main objectives for the day (beyond actually getting to the cottage, which was much easier than I had expected--it's tempting to say that the road in, although thinly snow-covered, is in better shape than it sometimes is in the summer) was to take a winter version of that serendipitous picture I got the week of Thanksgiving--this one:

This is the closest I managed, which was closer than I thought I was going to get for a while, when I was pretty sure the sun wasn't going to come out before I would have to give up:

Walking around that shore, which is the northwestern shore of what the kids when I was a kid called Beaver Bay, we happened upon some evidence that the bay is aptly named:

That there is a beaver latrine. This here--

--which was a couple of feet over, is presumably the beaver lodge. This tree--

--has been curled over the shore near the presumable beaver lodge for years now.

My one regret about that Thanksgiving picture is that I didn't get this rock--

--locally known as "the jumping rock", in it. Looking off its edge:

Here's L. walking down the side of it (not having struck it with her stick to bring forth water abundantly)--

--and around it, past the edge of the world:

On the way back across Beaver Bay, L. suggested attempting a snowman--

--which, given the poor quality of the snow, turned out somewhat grotesquely:

Is it still there?

We also made shadows:

Back on shore--L. suggests this is the kind of thing people paint:

And back in the hibernating cottage, I sat in my settin' chair by the front window and took in the winter view (which it occurs to me I had never seen before, since the only other time I'd been up there in the winter, with my parents and sister, we never went inside):