Snow, Snow, Snow, Snow, Snow...

It seems from the news that this has been an unusually cold and snowy year for all of Europe--we’ve been seeing snow all around the Mediterranean, in Italy and France, and parts of the Black Sea itself have frozen over. It’s been no different here. I haven’t seen a day without snow on the ground since before the snowy pictures in my last picture blog (January 19). Generally, it will go a day or two without snow and start to melt, then the next day or night it’ll dust the ground with a few inches—which means a lot of slush and mud, unfortunately. A few times, however, it will snow pretty heavily and/or continuously all night and day and give us a good five inches or so in a night. The last two days have been this latter case, and right now the snow’s up to my calves at least. It actually just stopped snowing for a bit (it hadn’t stopped from about 11:00 last night to maybe a half-hour ago, 11:30 this morning--and quite heavily snowing at that), but I’m sure it’ll start up in an hour or so again. There are icecycles longer than my arms in certain places [I later saw a few that were perhaps longer than my entire body], and I just got interrupted by the family all going outside to look at something; it turns out one of our water pipes has a sizeable leak now [it has since been fixed], having been rent under pressure from freezing. Luckily, most other things are simply inconveniences--there’s less travel, of course, and people drive slower, but they all know how to drive in this (unlike most drivers in western Washington), and I haven’t heard of any accidents. Sometimes you’re just stuck wherever you parked your car for a while, though. In western Georgia, it’s not quite as bad, but of course the passes are horrible, and every day the news shows all the cars slowly following the snow plows over them.  There are also some populated mountainous regions (e.g., Svaneti) that have it pretty bad.  You know it's cold when the Minister of Education of the whole country gives a couple days' snow break (that' why I'm not at school right now).  Indeed, my host parents said they haven't seen snow like this in 20 years.  Like I said, it's mostly inconveniences only, but it also means farmers can't do anything all day--our cow and chickens certainly aren't fond of the snow, and working in the fields definitely isn't going to happen.  But the question remains, when will it end?  There's a short poem about February my host father jokingly said at the table last night--"February is the last month of summer, and the cold is going away.  Probably the warmth of spring is coming, and you can see its first flowers."  That's far from a good translation; it's what I remember of what my host sister said was the gist of it.  Right now we're thinking it might be applicable by June or August.  But until then, we're gathering by the fire a lot, and enjoying as much as we can this winter wonderland of snow.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter