Indecisive March

March is such an indecisive month. I think whoever coined the phrase, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute,” must have done so in March. What other month can bring near-summer temperatures, mid-winter snow squalls, rain storms, thunder claps, and sunny blue skies all in one week?

Snow crocus

Even after such a weird-weather winter, this month has been intensely unpredictable.

The crocuses bloomed last week, the earliest I can remember them opening to the warming sun. And our first robins of the year flew into the yard weeks before their normal arrival date. We’ve had more birds at the feeder than ever before: chickadees and blue jays, nuthatches and woodpeckers, goldfinches and purple finches.

I’m loath to bring the feeder in with so much color and activity there, but I’m sure by now the bears are about, and I’d rather keep them out of the sandbox, which is next to the bird feeder. My kids rediscovered that sandbox last week. It’s been there all winter with hardly a skim of ice, but suddenly, with warmer weather, it was the new hot spot.

Maybe the sandbox is just better in shorts and t-shirts. And that’s what the kids were wearing, casting off their more practical mid-March outfits and digging into the summer clothes as soon as they’d walked in the door from school and dropped their backpacks.

My littlest one even asked for bug spray. I’m not sure if the bugs were actually in the sandbox with her or the request was just an innate response to wearing shorts. Regardless, the kids spent hours in the sand, making some combination of mud-sand whoopee pies and cookies and cakes, digging tunnels, getting thoroughly, happily dirty. It’s the most peacefully the three of them have played – I don’t know, maybe ever. As soon as dinner was in their bellies, back out they went until the dark crept in, later now that we’ve changed the clocks.

The next day dawned sunny and warmish, moved to a sky clustered with thunderheads, and ended with cold and wet. And then it snowed. Back out came the extra layers for skiing over the weekend, the neck warmers and thick fleece shirts. Flip-flops, still covered in sand, were chucked once more into the depths of the closet and replaced again by snow boots.

Yes, we are in that familiar March place, where we might ski or bike or walk along the beach at Echo Lake. Maybe all three in one day. The extended forecast calls for a continued mixed bag of sunshine, rain, snow, warmth and chilliness, sometimes all in the same day.

So, I’ll hold off washing up and packing away the winter gear for a while longer, at least until mid-April. March is such an indecisive month. You never know what’s coming next, and it’s best to be prepared – for a little bit of everything.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the March 25, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Ski Season Shuffle

We are three and a half months into ski season, with who knows how long to go. Despite the weird and wacky weather, which has brought us more rain this winter than snow, the skiing has been plentiful, and ski season has been busy. Busier than usual this year, because my children have entered into the world of ski racing, and I have jumped back into a weekend coaching gig.

Throw in a smattering of ski writing deadlines, which sometimes involve traveling to other ski areas, and it all means ski season is an all-consuming entity. The mudroom is a muddle of skis and boot bags and helmets. The gear collection spills into the living room, where ski boots are lined up to dry by the radiator, which is piled high with hats, mittens, and neck gaiters.

Notes about night skiing and spring skiing and adaptive skiing are scattered around my makeshift office at the dining room table. House projects we started months ago, including an ambitious plan to shift bedrooms, have been abandoned in the fullness of ski season. Non-skiing plans are delayed to that vague point of “after ski season,” and there are some friends we just don’t see as much this time of year.

This ski-centricity is a phenomenon probably impossible to explain to someone not involved in skiing. But my skiing friends and cohorts will understand: skiing is not merely a hobby, or a way to pass the normally cold and snowy months of winter, or even a passion. It is an inherent, un-extractable part of simply being.

Skiing is why we wake up before the sun during the darkest days of winter. It is why we don innumerable layers on the coldest days of the year and are willing to face the elements, whether sub-zero chill, gale force winds, sleet, rain, snow, or sunshine. It is why we forgo other things to buy equipment and passes and why we stay up late tuning skis. It is something we think about, sometimes dream about, during even the dog days of summer.

Skiing is why I moved west after college, seeking higher mountains, deeper snow, a skiing life in a skiing town. And it is why, when I came back East five years later, I landed in the mountains, why I am here still.

My dad used to tell me when I lived out west, probably in an attempt to lure me home again, that skiing is skiing. Doesn’t matter where you do it, it’s the same. I’d scoff at such a crazy concept as I headed out to ski Colorado powder on a mountain whose base was 5,000 feet higher in elevation than my home hill’s summit.

The snow in Crested Butte is a good bit different than the snow on Cannon Mountain. And it’s different, probably, than European snow and Tahoe snow and Midwestern snow. But it turns out that skiing IS skiing. Yes, skiing powder is different than skiing hard pack (and goodness knows there have been days this season when I have lamented the ice and longed for a deep dose of Rocky Mountain powder). Groomers are different than bump runs or glades. Flats are different than steeps.

But there’s something in the feeling of it all that is intrinsically the same. Skiing is freedom and grace. It is strength and precision and the thrill of self-made speed. It is unbridled joy at each perfect turn – and the imperfect ones, too.

Some ski seasons are longer than others. This one, here in the East, has been particularly challenging in many ways, and there are moments when I feel ready for the busy shuffle of ski season to shift definitively to spring, ready to pack away all the gear and move on to the next season, ready to sleep in and not hurry everyone out of the house for first chair.

But then I click into my skis and arc my way down a mountain and everything else fades away. There is only skiing then, and it is worth a little shuffling.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the March 11, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Going With The Flow

While I lamented the bare – and barely frozen – ground following the last in a series of winter rainstorms, my kids seemed happily oblivious to the utterly, depressingly un-snowiness of the landscape. They are winter-loving, snow fort-building, ski-fanatical kids. But rather than dwell on the lack of snow, they seem to intrinsically embrace the extended daylight that creeps into mid-February days and the subsequent opportunity for longer outside play.

Perhaps kids are simply better at going with the flow, rolling with the punches, living in the moment, looking on the bright side – pick your idiom. On the afternoon after a steady rain had washed every trace of winter from our yard, while I stewed over this no-snow season, the kids eagerly ran outside after school. They bypassed the pile of long neglected snowshoes on the front porch and the sleds leaning forlornly against the house, climbed past the plow left idle many weeks, and pulled their bikes from the depths of the garage.

Up our long driveway of frozen gravel and slim rivulets of ice they rode, visiting some of their favorite warmer-weather haunts in the yard, places that are normally buried in snow by the middle of February. A few days later, we were all back on snow – the manmade kind – to ski. And we’ll ski every day we can for as long as that manmade stuff sticks to the trails.

Where last winter seemed like a mini Ice Age of sustained subzero temperatures, allowing us to become acclimated to the constant cold, this winter has been an ongoing test of our ability to go with the ever-changing flow of the weather and its consequences.

We have skied on a rainy day when the wind blew so hard the raindrops came sideways: tiny, semi-frozen pellets pelting us mercilessly. We have skied in warm rain and on the days after, when the temperature drops and the skiing surface hardens to something resembling choppy pond ice. We have skied, very occasionally, in fresh snow. A couple weeks ago we braved wind chills of 40 degrees below zero to ski the nicest conditions we’ve had all year. The snow that day was soft, super-grippy, and utterly carve-able. The sun was out, and there were friends to ski with. My kids didn’t balk at the thought of skiing on such a frigid day. They just went with the normal Sunday morning flow: breakfast, ski boots, chairlift.

Two days later it was 40 degrees above zero and raining. Again. The day after that storm I returned home from coaching aspiring ski racers, frustrated by the unwintryness of this season and weary after a few hours of coaxing small children down trails coated in impenetrable ice.

I longed for tall snowbanks and frosted trees, the soft crispness of winter white, the magnificent quiet of new snow.

Instead I found the green tips of daffodils sprouting from the flower bed next to the house and muddy puddles that have been through so many freeze-thaw-freeze cycles in the past few weeks that I’ve lost track. This winter has seemed like one long April, when Ma Nature keeps us guessing as she switches the seasons in a one-step-forward-two-steps-back sort of manner.

Weather is notoriously unpredictable in any season, of course, although we keep trying to calculate which punches will be thrown next. I have found myself this winter checking the forecast with a sense of both urgency and dismay. Often the hopeful snowflakes predicted three days out become dreaded raindrops by the time we reach them.

It seems winter may well pass us by entirely this year. Perhaps it will arrive in April when even the snow-lovers among us are ready for spring. I’m trying to follow my children’s lead, to embrace whatever the weather throws at us, to be flexible in selecting outside activities, to just go with the flow. But I miss the snow, and next winter seems so far away.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the February 26, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.