This morning when I awoke I looked out of my bedroom window to see this year's first winter wonderland. Every tree, bush and branch was drawn in dark outlines topped with loads of soft, fluffy white snow. The air was very still, and the sky was silver grey. All the trees and mountains looked dark green or black. It was stark and beautiful.
We usully don't have snow here where I live until the end of December. Other parts of Canada, from the Atlantic island provinces to Edmonton in the flat prairies have been unseasonably warm this fall. A few days ago people were actually playing golf in their t-shirts in Edmonton! Edmonton is in a very cold part of Canada, so the warm autumn weather was almost unbelievable. Polar bears in the arctic need ice to reach the seals so they can eat their fill before the coldest winter weather arrives and the ice was late this year. Many autumn warm weather records have been broken in Central and Eastern Canada.
Things have been just as usual where I live. We didn't have the unseasonally warm weather in which the rest of the country was basking. From west of Edmonton to the Pacific coast our weather has been just about what could be expected, but now the snows have arrived a few weeks to a month early. I wonder if it will stay?
Yesterday, as fluffy flakes were beginning to fall many excited little birds darted about through the air, chattering to each other, swooping down to pick grains of seeds from the grass before it was covered. Suddenly, one tiny bird made a mistake and flew straight into my kitchen window with a loud thump! I saw it fall to the ground about ten feet away. It didn't move and snow began to cover the little form. My heart was touched as I watched the still little body in the snow, so I put on my work gloves, gathered a cloth and a cardboard box and went outside. I carefully lifted the beautiful little black capped bird with blue bars in its wing feathers and a long swooping tail onto the soft pad of cloth in the little box, and set it in a sheltered place without wind or snow, near my window.
As I prepared the batter for two banana loafs I often went to my kitchen window to check on the limp little bird. I even said a prayer of hope for it. At last there seemed to be some slight change. Time passed and finally it roused. Then the pretty line of head and shoulder were silhouetted against the cloth. A quarter of an hour later it turned its head toward the chatter of its friends in the big sheltering cedar hedge. I imagined it planning how to fly from the box to join them. The next time I looked the box was empty. I was glad for the little bird. It survived, and would live on. The banana loaves smelled delicious as they baked in the bright, warm kitchen.
Mary, writing from Canada
