The Wearin' o' the White.

3-17-11 VERMONT: It’s St. Pat’s Day, but Vermont is wearing the white not the green. I came up yesterday and saw patches of snow in CT, sparse cover in MA, but in VT—lots of snow. There’s so much snow on the ground that half of our garage is inaccessible. The plow piles and piles under the eaves are huge, but there’s 18 inches of snow around the house and covering the pasture.

Sam, Chloe and I walked around this morning staying on top of the frozen snow. I broke through a couple of times and was in up to my knee each time. That’s an excellent technique for getting a boot full of snow. The taps and buckets are out on all the sugar maples. Across the road they were boiling yesterday. It smelled like wood-smoke and syrup.

It’s warm, 50’s, and sunny today, and I cleared some of the snow from the deck. In addition to the accumulation of fallen snow, the deck catches the snow falling off the east side of the roof. The snow, falling two stories, lands with a house-shaking thud and gets compacted and heavy. I cut it into two foot square chunks and slide them off the deck through gates in the railing put there for that purpose.


Deck with snow, open gate.


Plenty of snow above and below that wall. The bell post is three feet tall.

No room on this park bench.

If the buckets are out, it must be March.