cimorene

It snowed last week - like, barely, and not enough to cover everything, but it did snow! So it's time to get the winter tires put on the car, which meant hauling them up out of the cellar. And it's also time to tuck in the garden for winter!

We turned the rain barrels upside down - a little late, because they both had skins of ice over the top. We put the watering cans and garden implements and the odd roll of chickenwire in the cellar, put the glass panes back in the cellar windows, and raked piles of leaves over all the bushes and perennials to keep their roots warm. Wax piled some compost on the especially delicate ones (roses, clematis) and the berry bushes, for a little extra warmth and food, and then I put raked leaves on top of that. It's getting cold on the enclosed porch, though not below freezing yet - it's enclosed but not insulated: single panes of glass and uninsulated walls. So the chrysanthemums will have to go out of there into the cellar soon, but we have to check up on the correct way to winter them (they might have to be cut back first?). We already brought the coleus in and they think it's spring because it's so much warmer inside now the radiators have turned on. They're budding and branching and shooting up and will have to be pruned soon if we don't want them to look ludicrously leggy.

We brought in a load of firewood - in two plastic buckets, because all my attempts to find a proper firewood carrier that we can buy have failed so far (like... in the past three weeks). The places I checked nearby are out, or out of all the ones except weirdly small and expensive aluminum ones. The traditional Finnish ones are usually big baskets like this, called a pärekori in Finnish, spånkorg or pärtkorg in Swedish. Uh, Wiktionary claims that they're called a splint basket or chip basket in English, though I've never heard that... possibly it's regional. Or simply fallen out of use. (Looking a little deeper, the word for what they're made of - päre, pärt - means shingle, and the Swedish definition is clear that you can use them either for roofing a house or for making a basket. Or, in old time Finland, clogs and bags and backpacks.)

These are the kind of things you can buy from little stalls at the market square, and in fact I've done that before (in Turku) to give them as presents, and we have a little one for carrying the shopping in and two giant ones for laundry that belonged to Wax's mom. But this particular shape with the high triangular sides and the square footprint is the one that's typically used for carrying wood. And in fact this photo is from the chain just down the street, but that branch of it doesn't have them in stock, because that would be too easy. (Same thing with two other major national chains' closest branch stores in Kaarina, about fifteen minutes away). It's getting to the point where I'm thinking about ordering one online, as ludicrous as that seems, because it's easier than driving to the market in Turku, or the big home center in Raisio (another Turku suburb, but it's on the other side of it, by Ikea). Our little town only has a tiny miniature market square and it's only open a short while once a week - we've never actually been to it while it was open.

But in spite of the plastic buckets, I scraped out the ash and Wax made a fire in the cast iron stove, and we had a cup of tea and a giant peanut butter cookie in front of it while we sorted through the big bin of wool socks, hats, gloves, and legwarmers to check for moth damage. We trashed a few socks that had seen better days, sealed a few merino tshirts with pinholes near the hems into a bag to put in the freezer, and the rest of my merino and silk base layers are now airing with the laundry. (Wax only has one base layer, a tshirt I bought her, because she insists she is never cold and doesn't need them.) All our legwarmers escaped unscathed, and there are plenty of wool socks left in the plastic bin, now sealed into it against further moth incursions and put by the shoes.