Technically this is a selfie. I was too lazy to turn the camera around.

I took a lot of pictures on our Sunday afternoon walk, which may turn out to have been the last day with double-digit temperatures this fall. Yesterday afternoon we had a snow squall, quite an intense one. My wife and I will still walk in winter, though maybe not for as long each time.

When our son was first born we lived for a year in Liberia, which is an incredibly beautiful country. However, they don’t have much variety when it comes to weather. It rains for six months of the year (up to 15 centimetres, or six inches, daily). The other six months it is dry. It took me a couple of months to figure it out, but I finally realized what was different about Liberian radio: no weather forecasts. You could learn pretty much everything you needed to know about the day’s weather by looking at a calendar. It was going to be either hot and wet or hot and dry.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I enjoy living in a place that has four distinct seasons, though that enjoyment can be tempered when there is 30 centimetres of new-fallen snow and I have a shovel in my hand. I like snow, but do question why God didn’t arrange it so that it all evaporates after 24 hours. Beauty with no work sounds very appealing. And yes, I do understand why God didn’t set it up that way. Work can be good for us, and if snow vanished shortly after falling then we would miss out on a lot of winter sports.

So I will drink in the colours at this time of year. Why not sip them with me?