Following my footsteps frozen into the snow makes the walk treacherous and even harder when pulling a large tarp loaded with lose hay along. Stepping down the frozen trail to the barn twice a day to feed my two old horses is my daily chore. Worrying about the heavy load on the cabin roof and carport I climbed up there three times this season to get the snow off and make sure that the roofs won’t collapse. The snow is heavy and layered with ice and the snow banks are higher than I ever remember. Shoveling my long driveway is starting to have a toll on my body. My neighbours live miles away with their own problems trying to survive the harshness of the season. It is still, no movement apart from the flames flickering in the old wood stove, cats and dog making their presence known, and the refrigerator summing in frequencies. The snow banks reach as high as the windows of my house and up to the cabin and carport roofs. The sun comes out sparsely and by the time I’m outside to catch some rays it’s already disappearing behind the hills and the landscape turns back into white and grey. The snow came early in November and so did the cold temperatures. It has been long and severe and it’s dragging on. It never lasts for long it’s just cabin fever and it passes, just as the long, cold, dark season eventually passes. It’s caused by lack of sunlight, lack of contact with the rest of the world and hits me when the dark days and the cold nights slowly turn into an attack of loneliness.

Every winter since my arrival in Canada more than two decades ago I live through a dark period when I get my winter blues. I never knew until this winter what cabin fever truly means.

The long dark cabin fever