Chilly in Erie

Doug (my spouse) and I visited his mom for Thanksgiving this week. She lives in Erie, PA. I really like where she lives. Her house is only a block away from a really beautiful lake that is lined with little trees. In the summer, there’s a rental store where one can rent a canoe and putter around on the lake. Even in winter, there are ducks that swim around on the surface.

Of course, in winter, the place looks pretty desolate. My mother-in-law’s house is close enough to the Great Lakes that she gets the dreaded “lake effects snow” for weeks on end. Oddly enough, this snow doesn’t really pile up. It’s a thin flurry that falls from the sky all day and all night. It’s quite pretty to look at.

 

My guess is that the ring of trees are a recent phenomenon, since they all look pretty small. I’m sure that it’ll be pretty impressive in another decade or so.

It’s sort of hard to do a real power-walk in weather like this. It’s 30 degrees outside, windy, and overcast. I wore my heaviest sweater and my heaviest coat (the full length insulated leather trench coat that looks like something out of the movie “Shaft”) and I was freezing cold within a minute after leaving the house. Egads! I don’t know how the ducks could take it, but I know that I couldn’t!