Noah's Ark / die Arche Noahs

I am starting to feel like we are living on Noah's Ark in winter time. It has been snowing and raining and snow-raining (Schneeregen is a real German term) for what seems like forty days and nights. It snows each night, lightly, but enough so that another four to six inches blankets the ground come daylight. The snow keeps coming down until somewhere around mid-day when it turns to rain or Schneeregen, matting down the fluffy snow that fell overnight and in the morning. This continues until nightfall, when the snow resumes, and the cycle starts all over again. It makes for beautiful mornings, the snow coating every branch on every tree, something that happens only rarely in other places I've lived.

The combination of snow - rain - Schneeregen means that the snow doesn't really ever pile up. We'd have many feet of snow by now otherwise. The au naturel methods of snow removal are starting to get a little tiresome. The sidewalks are never really clear. The roads are never really clear. Snowplows come through occasionally in our neighborhood, but never really seem get to road level (Check out the plow job in this photo!). Peter shovels the sidewalk in front of our building, but only because no one seems to be responsible for clearing any sidewalks anywhere. People clean off their own cars and dig out their own cars, creating growing mountains by the sides of the roads, and they look at Peter strangely with his shovel as if they've never seen one.

I am missing the balmier climates of Turkey and England. In England, the snow drops are blooming and the daffodils are soon to follow. Ah, spring! But, Nikolas is loving all the snow. For him, the mountains offer great play places. They are probably as tall proportionally to his height as the enormous snow mountains in Chicago-land in the winter of 1979 were to my height when I played Island of the Blue Dolphins on the parkway in front of our house and snow accumulation (not in shovel/plow piles) was 47 inches high! He's brought out his sand toys to dig tunnels and make tracks for his cars. He likes to make snow balls and send them rolling down the mountains, avalanche style. He makes offices (?!) and does his work. Sometimes he helps to shovel and clean of the car, but mostly he just plays and plays and plays.