As someone who's barely experienced snow, I love it. The way it makes everything look clean and white, the crunchiness underfoot, and the sunlight sparkling off it.
This year we've had more snow than I've ever experienced. The first fell on January 1st, it's now mid February, and we just had another light flurry. Most years here we've had a light scattering one day, and it's melted away by the next.
The forecast now is for rain and rising temperatures, which should clear all the snow and ice away, and I'll be relieved when it's done. I don't want to be happy about that, with the regular top-ups it's stayed pretty, and avoided the usual grey urban slush for now, but even with that it's also been very inconvenient.
We cycle a lot of get around the local neighbourhood, bring children to school and do shopping; it's a huge time saver. But with the snow, and resulting ice, that's not been possible. Cycle paths normally cause disagreements; but the one thing that the city council and citizens can agree on is that cycle paths are where the unwanted snow should be piled.
While major roads have been regularly cleared, side roads haven't, and neither have any cycle paths I've seen. We don't own a car to fall back onto, and don't really want to buy one just for this case. It might also not be that much help.
Around our neighbourhood numerous lampposts and signposts that have been knocked over by a careering cars. Just outside our driveway a car slide over the threshold of a side street and smashed into the side of another going along a main road (luckily no-one was hurt). Last Saturday, while waiting to cross the road, another car failed to compensate for the ice (after six weeks of practice), and instead of turning the corner slid up to the pavement where I was standing. Given how dangerous driving appears to be for cars, cycling wasn't worth the risk.
I've been pretty pessimistic on the chances of self-driving cars technology succeeding so far, but given that the threshold to drive more sensibly than a human appears to be an incredibly low, it might be closer than I think.
The ice has also made commuting much harder. I normally cycle to work, but I have been dependent on the buses the last few weeks. The bad weather, a few strikes, and high demand from all the other people unable to cycle have made using them slow and stressful. A half hour cycle ride now takes on average more than an hour by bus, standing a freezing bus stops included.
On the upside, the children have mostly loved the snow, and it's probably set unrealistic expectations as to how much snow to expect in future winters. Child B went sledging so many times with us and the nursery that they became bored of it. We've seen a few generations of snow men in our garden come and go over the weeks. The children have also really enjoyed seeing the couple of ponds in the neighbourhood freeze over, trying to smash the ice with sticks, and hearing that strange popping echoy sound you get when hitting a suspended ice surface.
In January we also saw the aurora for the first time. We've looked before when the solar activity was 'high' and seen nothing. This time it was obvious, previously it was hard to be certain it was more than the glow of the city lights, but this time the shifting red and green glow was clear. At one point a large luminous green 'cloud' appeared, and shifted over us, as we stood in the dark of the parking spot, shielded from the street lights by the neighbour's house. The photos we took it looks much more spectacular than what we saw with the naked eye, but even that was impressive.
The cold weather has also driven more birds to our garden feeder, and for the larger birds who can't perch on it we've been putting some seed in a plate on the porch. We don't often see birds there, but the seeds have been disappearing, and the scattered tracks of footprints prove they've been visiting.
I'll be glad to get the freedom of cycling around again as the weather returns to its usual grey drizzle, but it has been beautiful. Thin tree branches picked out in white, the frost crystals catching the morning light on windows, and scattered evening sunlight scattered in the hazy air and white ground. Hopefully with time I'll just remeber how pretty it was, and how much the children enjoyed it, and not how many mysteriously missing buses I had to wait for.