Even the river is freezing now.
Some swans have joined the more common ducks (mallards) in the river. Two of them are grey. Not sure I've ever seen swans of that colour before? The all white ones are the most common here.
I've been trying to remember when we last had a really cold winter like this. I know the first two winters I after I moved to this town were extremely snowy and cold. I moved here on one of the first days of January 1986, and that day it was snowing heavily. I started a new job a few days later, in a village 20 km or so outside town, and had to travel there and back by bus every day(since I had no car). The landscape I passed on the way looked surreal with snowcovered forest and vast fields of deep, untouched snow. The next winter I was working mostly in town, but still had to travel by bus a lot between several different workplaces, and that winter too was very snowy and cold.
This morning, the local newspaper confirmed that my memory serves me right: This winter is the coldest we've had around here since 1987.
The ice sculpture in the Market Square revisited:
The little cub at the feet of the big bear
is now all covered in snow.
The little cub at the feet of the big bear
is now all covered in snow.
My personal cold record is from New Year 1978/79. (I was 23.)
That New Year, our youth gospel choir went on tour to the north of Värmland. Some of the cars we used were not in the best of shape. Our pastor, for example, had to steer his car with one hand and keep using the ice-scraper on the inside of the windscreen with the other hand all the time, the whole way. (About 100 km.) The car I was going in (belonging to a friend) had to be pushed to a start almost every time. We slept on air mattresses on the floor in the local school. From there to the little church where we sang in a couple of services, I think it was about 1 km, and most of us walked that way on foot several times during those couple of days. At midnight on New Year's Eve, we also sang at some kind of club. I caught a cold, and a fever... Afterwards - safely back home - we learned that the temperature had been down to -40C that New Year's night in the village where we had been staying. Probably just as well we did not know at the time exactly how cold it was!!!
New Year 1978/79, Värmland
(The other pictures above are from today.)
(The other pictures above are from today.)
1 comment:
I have never been or lived in cold like you are having. the coldest was 16 and that only 3 times in my life. I am from the south, Georgia and Florida and we don't get very cold. this has been the coldest ever in the 26 years i have been in Florida. 27 degrees and 30's for 2 weeks. Not what we are used to.
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