Relax, it's just a blizzard.

Jack's inconvenient resting place at the base of my office chair.

Eagle River beach on Lake Superior...frozen solid as far as the eye can see.

Winter on the Keweenaw Peninsula has a way of focusing the mind. It's pretty damned cold and there are currently over 256 inches of snow on the ground and a blizzard is howling outside. If your front and back doors happen to open outward (as mine do) you've spent a portion of the past 24 hours just making sure you can get out of the house if the need arises.

But if you are Jack, you take it all in stride. 30-mile-an-hour sustained winds, all the better to catch those exotic scents from the woods outside of town. Mountains of snow where the back yard used to be, all the better to watch the passing snow plows and check up on the neighbor's black lab two blocks away.

And when the blizzard does finally pass, your favorite beach—now an expanse of snow and frozen waves—will be ready for another visit. And the deer herd wintering by the lake is soooo interesting it more than makes up for the cold.

Deer at Eagle River, MI.

Bracing for November, and December, and January...

Just surviving winter feels like an accomplishment up here. I know, I know, it is only late October. Halloween is not quite here. I shouldn't go around looking for trouble, and today was spectacular--bright sunshine burned off the morning fog and glowed through the yellow leaves still hanging from most of the birches and maples.

But it is hard not to anticipate the cold that is soon to come, even on a warm, sunny day. The fog was the soft blanket that followed last night's hard frost.

And while the fog gradually burned off, I helped my sister and brother-in-law stack more than a cord of wood in the barn behind their house. That cord was less than half the mountain of wood they will move and stack in neat rows in preparation for the worst of the winter months.

Even with all our modern power tools and conveniences, winter is a lot of work. Living where living itself feels like the achievement is a challenge to my middle-class sensibilities. A good thing, I think, most days.