It's baaack! Old-time winter weather

Our home in Nolalu as seen today, Nov. 10

The temperature this morning was -20 C here at our home in Nolalu, ON, which is 50 kilometers (30 miles) southwest of Thunder Bay. That is the coldest it has been this early winter and reminds me of what Novembers used to be like before climate change.
I especially remember one Remembrance Day (Nov. 11) in the mid-1980s. It was -30C. The day sticks in my mind because I shot a big buck whitetail that morning. With the help of a friend I brought it back to our house and hung the deer in the garage. The deer was enormous and had 13 points. I wanted Brenda and the kids to see it before I cut it up and so waited until they all got home after school.
By 4 p.m. I tried to butcher the deer and found it was frozen rock solid. I ended up taking it into our wood-fired sauna to thaw it.
In those days we still lived in the original house made on our property. It had been built about 75 years earlier and started out as a 16x20 squared-timber homestead cabin. The woodstove was our sole source of heat. I followed the previous owners advice and would fill the woodshed attached to the garage with wood each summer. The shed held about eight cords. By the end of each November I would start to panic because we had already consumed one-third of our wood supply. That happened not only because the temperature was so cold but also because November is a notoriously cloudy month so there was little solar gain in the daytime. A further complication was a lack of snow for which to bank the house. I would often scrape the ground for hundreds of feet to get something to pile against the building and block the wind and cold from underneath.
December always brought deeper snow and although the daylight was even shorter, there were more clear days. We barely had to fill the stove if the sun was shining through the windows.