Winter in Earnest, Early 2008

         Last year during the first half of January (it’s hard to remember, but true), the grass was still green under a thin layer of frost, and the first significant snow did not fall until Martin Luther King Day.   This season, by the time New Years Day rolled around, we had had 5 or 6 serious “snowfall events” already in upstate New York, and those of us born before the phrase “global warming” was in vogue are having flashbacks to the ten foot deep snowbanks of our youth, and the tunnels we used to dig, and the games of King of the Mountain we would play—heaving each other headfirst off the snowplow-piled peaks.   I’m glad my kids and their cousins and friends will get to experience a winter like this, to create deep white memories of their own.

Waynesword, into March 08

Altitude, Latitude, & Attitude

Early March:

      I suppose that if I don’t want to be stuck in Mid-Winter mode in cyberspace anymore, I’d better commence with my next piece. Up on the western plateau of Middle Grove, however, it still looks like winter as I write this, with a snow cover still a foot or two thick, and snowbanks along the road still four feet high, with more snow potentially aiming this way soon. It’s been coming in regular doses since November this season, and, early in March, shows no signs of easin’

WaynesWord (Skip April, Straight to) May 2008

Here, as in many parts of the country, it was a long and somewhat harsh winter, which carried on long past when March was supposed to have gone out like a lamb. There were snowbanks and stubborn patches of crusty whiteness visible till mid-April in Middle Grove, and even longer in the foothills and ridges to the northwest of
here.