A wonderful feeling comes over you, when you look out the window, and see the road covered in snow, a little voice inside of you shouts, “Yeah! It’s a Snow Day”  It is as though some great god or saint gave you a free pass, because there is nothing else you can do, except curl up with a woodstove pumping out waves of heat, the inane TV, loud music or a good book (my choice). Perhaps your choice of pastimes is a hobby, but we all know this is one of those treasured days, when the normal routine must come to a halt, for safety reasons. As the day winds down the little pleasures, we have given ourselves, hang in the suspended minutes, if only this could be every day. How do you get to that state of living, put the rush of jobs, family and friends behind us?

For me, moving to the Cariboo was a choice, but I still wasn’t prepared for it. Planning for the eventual move started six years before the fateful day in 2011. We purchased a small house in the 100 Mile House area for our retirement. Retirement wasn’t supposed to happen for another ten years. Each day there was a ‘snow day’, I felt guilty. Fourteen months later I think the guilt is nearly gone. Okay, I’ve massaged the guilt by going back to school, so in a sense, I am working. I tell my friends that I’m staving off dementia. In truth I’m building a new career so when the real snow days come I can enjoy them.

The value in life is not defined by what you do, but how you enjoy each passing day. Do the hours stretch before you, beckoning you to learn something new?  Do you have more snow days than routine days where you can explore new facets of life? I like to think that my life is full of snow days, but then the cats need to be fed, the floor needs washing, there is a school assignment do and I can feel the stress building in my muscles. Finding a way to slow the routine down as though it was snowing and I had nothing better to do than curl up with a book. With less stress we are all able to accomplish more.

Think back to your last day when you could do nothing, but stay at home, I bet you accomplished many things.

When my time is not dedicated to other endeavors, I like to quilt. What does this have to do with research on the Cariboo? Hang on for a minute, I have to back up. A number of years ago, a good quilting friend, presented our quilting guild with a lesson on how to choose colour, based on the landscape. Late last month, when one of those other endeavors took hold, photography, I grabbed my camera and wandered off early on a sunny Monday morning to capture the colours of fall. The pictures sat in the camera for a couple of weeks until my husband started to play with a few of the pictures of the area around Green Lake just Northeast of 70 Mile house.

For the first time I saw how the oranges, browns and wheat colours could be the bases of a quilt. A landscape, I feel so connected to through my families' movements, spoke to me in a very different way. So the search is on for those colours and finding a way to design a Cariboo Quilt. The hunt for a piece of an old Hudson Bay Co. brigade trail is on. I want to combine a piece of the trail with the colours from the fall.