On the seventh of December, men stood in the garage and said: “Yep, snow before Pearl Harbor Day; it’s gonna be a good winter.” Then, armed with electrical cords, blow torches, and cans of ether, they marched into the snow-bleared yard to do battle with the gelled diesel in their equipment.
Later that week, clipper systems funneled down from Canada. Snows fell lightly but in every form imaginable: big lacey drops, hard frozen rain drops, feather drops where the flakes flutter like moths against pewter skies.
Driveways iced. Fingers froze. At work people toiled; at play, they rejoiced. Hunters with muzzleloaders tracked buck deer through snow-garland-draped spruces. Children swarmed sliding hills like otters at a pondside slick. After dark, skiers took to the forest to glide through negative light, tree silhouettes puddled in long shadows before them.
On the tenth, the snows came in earnest – an afternoon storm that appeared gently on winds too light to feel. One minute the sky was calm and gray, the next the air was in a Christmas way. Snow fell heavy and vertical in the manner of an elementary school play, where stagehands dump Styrofoam peanuts from a platform onto actors below. It was so wet that the first two inches accumulated on roads but yielded under truck tires; big rooster tails pummeling the sides of vehicles as they passed each other on the road. Temperatures dropped through the night, and one week later some houses in Orange County, Vermont, were just getting their power back.
A storm like this in March can feel like a punch, but in December it seems like part of the natural order we Northeasterners love; love kindled through rosy-glassed memories and stories from an older time.
Last week, men in green flannel coats pulled a stuck car with Jersey plates off the Kelly Stand Road, about a mile and a half in. When asked what he was doing up there, the flatlander replied: “The GPS said this was the way to Stratton Mountain .”
Last week, the chimneys on all the wood-burning houses in town were in full bloom, and the mountains to the east were purple on white as shards of setting sunlight illuminated the valley, and the song dogs started singing right after dark.
A curtain of clouds obscured the solstice meteor show, but A. and company stood by a bonfire and drank wine and dodged tipsy paper lanterns as they plummeted back to earth. She called it “solsticey-type perfection.”
This morning, the rain is falling and the snow is disappearing. The television weather man just told me that it will rain on Christmas, and he and the newswoman bemoaned the prediction. They both looked genuinely hurt. But all I could think is that we’ve pretty much had snow on the ground since Thanksgiving here. And that November and December have pretty much been, for two straight years now, old school wintery in the very best way.
Probably I’ve just been watching too many Christmas movies lately, but it seems like there’s a lesson here worth noting. How nice it’s been. How thankful I am.
Hope you all have a wonderful holiday and a happy new year.
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