2012 Official Where The Heck has Winter Been Day

(Written on March 1, 2012. Forgotten for more than 3 months, but here it is.)

Today is the first day of March. Since it is a Leap Year, winter is one day longer than usual, and yet it has taken until today to get a decent snowstorm. Normally I'd be writing my Officially Sick of Winter entry... but we have not had any winter to speak of, so how can I be sick of it?

There was a storm on the last weekend of October, but it dropped at most 6" on ground not yet frozen, and it all melted away before too many days had passed. There was snow on the ground for Thanksgiving, but by early December, that too was gone. There was no white Christmas here, and the only precipitation we saw for most of January was frequent hard rain that ate the frost out of the ground, and made the riverbanks, grievously wounded by last summer's floods, to melt away and crumble into the river, turning the water an awful murky dun color, like coffee with too much cream in it. What ice did form in the rivers was made of muddy water, and each rainfall would heave jumbled stacks of mud-ice blocks onto the riverbanks.

The hardest snowfall in January was a stationary squall that sat on the mountains between here and Manchester on the night of January 13th. My windshield wipers suddenly refused to function, so I rode with Linda, and we came up to Rawsonville. It snowed as hard that evening as I have ever seen it snow; we literally could not see ten feet in front of the truck, and sometimes could not see past the frantic wipers. It took an hour to travel the 15 miles from there to here, and by the time we reached home, Linda was a trembling wreck. Within an hour of our arrival, the snow had stopped and the clouds dissolved, leaving a star-dusted sky behind, as if to mock us and say, "see, you should have stayed put for another hour, and you'd have been all right."

Stupid weather.

February is often the coldest month, when the snow is deepest, and the deep frost buckles roads into wrinkled, broken devices of torment, when rivers are usually invisible under their blankets of snow-covered ice. This year, February was mild. Temperatures in the mid-40s were common, and nudged 50 degrees in warm valleys late in the month. In most locations beneath, say, 2000 feet in elevation, the ground was bare. Lawns started to have the soggy green look of early spring. Snowdrops emerged and budded.

On Leap Day, however, the snow began to fall. It came down pretty steadily all afternoon, and had accumulated about 4" by nightfall. Of course, I had to make an emergency trip to work, and drove home on a sloppy road, but it wasn't a bad drive. I've driven in worse.

Today it has snowed all day, sometimes hard, sometimes not snowing much at all. The radar picture shows another burst of snow coming from the west; the storm should be pretty well played out by nightfall, and will have left us with about 12".

The old hitching post in the front yard

This morning I went for a short walk up into the woods, while it was still snowing quite hard. Once I got up among the trees, there was almost perfect silence around me, save for the whisper of snow falling through the dry beech leaves, and the distant, muted sounds of traffic on the road - the scrape and rumble of a plow, the purr of a car passing, its tires silenced by the snow in the road. There were no birds in the woods; all the little feathered freeloaders were congregated around the feeders in the back yard, but even there they were not making much sound. It was mostly the soft buzz of their wings, the little kissing sounds the juncos make, and the occasional cussing of blue jays.

The woods were so peaceful. The columns of trees reached high overhead, darkening the already dim daylight, and holding little clumps of snow on bumps in their bark. There were no tracks, save the little stitched trail where a mouse had emerged from the snow and bounded across the path. The air was cold, but not bitter, and smelled fresh and clean - the exact but indefinable scent of snow.

I returned to the house when the wind came up a little, and thick white plumes of snow began to fall from the trees. I didn't want to get buried, so came back home, and changed into a more waterproof jacket, and went to start the tractor.

It wouldn't start, of course.

I shoveled out the area in front of the garage, and then returned to the house to tell Dad I couldn't get the thing to go. So Dad pulled on his boots - a laborious task, with his bad knees, hips and back - and got his coat and hat, and walking sticks, and we went over to the tractor, and he tried to start it, and it wouldn't go for him, either. We ran an extension cord out and plugged in the tractor's block heater, and we slogged back to the house, where Dad pored over the tractor manual, and then called Dave, the indispensable, and we waited.

After a little while Dad said he had an idea, and wanted to go back out, so he donned his warm things and scuffed back over to the garage. I had to get some supper going, and so started a pot of soup, planning to go over as soon as it was on the stove to simmer, but in the meantime, Dave pulled in and plowed a lot of the driveway, and helped Dad get the tractor started, so Dad cleared the rest of the yard, and I got the soup going.

It's just about 4pm now, and snowing quite hard again, though I doubt it will fill up the driveway.  The soup is bubbling happily on the stove. Mom is napping on the sofa; Dad has changed to warm dry clothes, and it's about time I took my boots off, because I'm not going out in the snow again, I don't think. Though it may be my last chance this winter to go out into the snow, I will pour a cup of Darjeeling and let the storm finish up without my interference.