How Sneaky Hollow Began

For years, Retchless Weather Services has been delivering the daily forecast on Facebook. Not your typical Environment Canada bulletin, more like weather as told by someone who wass actually living through it.

On a stormy winter's day in 2025, the forecast went something like this:

"The wind is blowing stronger than my great-aunt Thema blowing out her birthday candles. The streets are slipperier than my two cousins coming out of the mud wrestling pit at the Ayers Cliff fair."

Somewhere in the middle of that forecast, I looked up and saw it, a Townships town full of colourful characters, gathered around a woodstove in a general store, arguing about the weather and everything else. I gave them a café. I gave them a name. And I gave them a weather page to haunt.

The folks of Sneaky Hollow became guest stars on Retchless Weather Services. Readers kept saying the same thing: "You should write a book."

So I did. And here it is.

Click below to visit some of the early Retchless Weather posts that started it all. Once golden, always golden.

The Pine Knot General Store and Café

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The First Pine Knot Sneaky Hollow Weather Report

Feb 8th, 2025 - A comment from a reader: Love all your descriptive words….maybe you should write a novel.

First reference of Sneaky Hollow: April 2025

The Eastern Townships Summer Forecast

Straight from the Pine Knot General Store Just up the road from Sneaky Hollow - Earl’s proud to say, “We’ve got one of everything you need... and if it don’t work, there’s always duct tape!”

Well folks, it’s that time of year again— When the ol’ timers gather 'round the pot-bellied stove down at Pine Knot General, sippin’ on coffee strong enough to clean spark plugs, and swearin’ they can read summer’s future in the bark of a birch tree, or the tilt of a crow’s wing as it glides over the lake.

Yep, the great seasonal debate is in full swing. They’re tossin’ around more theories than at a fishing derby on free beer night.

They’ve checked the thickness of the beaver pelts,

measured how high the squirrels are buildin’ their nests,

and counted the number of frogs croakin’ before sunset.

Heck, old Earl swears he saw a woolly bear caterpillar cross the road in reverse and that’s gotta mean somethin’.

’Cause when it comes to forecasting, predicting summer in the Townships is about as easy as stackin’ greasy firewood—

Looks simple ‘til it lands square on your big toe. So what have the esteemed weather sages at the Pine Knot General store come up with for this summer?

Let's take a gander at Late Spring (May into Early June)