When the roads are a bit more passable, I also want to declutter my freezer of comestibles I will not eat — specifically two one-kilo packets of stuffed tortellini and three bags of cranberries. (I love cranberry sauce, but I know exactly how much sugar it involves.) I’ll hang onto the frozen wild blueberries.

Today began with blowing-snow warnings on the radio. In my far-distant youth, every country road was lined by snow fences that halted the movement of blowing snow before it could cover the pavement. A snow fence was a flimsy thing of cheap wooden slats wired together and anchored to four-foot posts made of angle-iron. It could not restrain even the most docile dairy cow, but it admirably did the job for which it was designed. The winter landscape was marked by windrows of snow pocked with the tops of the iron posts, and the roads were somewhat less dangerous. A good thing as the cell phone had yet to be invented and one hit the ditch in the certainty of a very long, cold, wait for help.

Southwestern Ontario is apparently innocent of snow-fencing, and so we have blowing-snow alerts.