Big House, Little Woods

It snowed ever so quietly all night long, so this morning when we awoke, the world looked much more snowy than the last time I’d checked it. I still can’t get up the driveway even more so, and I don’t have high boots so I passed on a walk to the beach, although maybe tomorrow. The trees were absolutely full, every cedar branch, in particular, fully laden. But then, the slightest movement of air would cause the branch to suddenly release all its burden, which would then fall, as if into an invisible cylinder, slowly sifting down to the ground. It made me feel a little leery about going out because at any minute something considerable might fall on me.

We used to have a cedar shake roof on this log house, but about ten years ago it needed replacing and we were persuaded to change to a metal roof. All in all, we’ve been satisfied with it, but there were two things that we didn’t realize at the time. One was that the local bats slept in that roof, so once the shakes were gone, all the bats needed some other kind of housing. Ed built bat houses around for them out of the cedar shake remnants, but the last one he built didn’t quite get finished because it seemed to me that, as it was, it made a fine outdoor sculptural piece. The first photo above is of the incomplete bat house, which stands on a post about 25 or so feet off the ground, and lacks a front wall. If the wall had gone on it, bats would have roosted there, hanging upside down in their little individual cubbyholes. But it looks good in the snow, even without the bats.

The second thing we didn’t know was what happens to large snowfalls on metal roofs on a two-story house. It is a well-insulated roof, so it just stays pretty much the same temperature as the outside air and the snow on it. And the snow mounds up. So when there’s snow maybe 8 or so inches deep on it, it just sits there until the outer temperature starts to warm up. Then, the snow mass ever so slowly begins to slide down the steep slope of the roof. It projects out over the roof edge until the weight gets to be too much and then, suddenly, it all comes down at once, making a sound like a nearby explosion. The second picture is of that roof snow starting to slide down past the roof edge. About twenty minutes after the picture was taken, a very large amount of snow avalanched down on to the deck, which has glass panels on the front edge. Enough snow comes down, the panels are at risk.

I believe we are expecting snow tomorrow. Or at least I am. The odds would appear to be with me.