What happened to Winter?

The driveway this winter has progressed through a somewhat regular and recurring rotation of fresh snow, slushy post-rain puddles, and the thick ice that forms when temps drop from well above freezing to well below. There is no consistency to winter anymore, it seems.

Missing snowier days...

We survived the deep freeze of Christmas week, whose brutal cold sapped our energy and made our fingers and toes ache. By the end of those two frigid weeks, even the most outdoor-loving of my outdoor-loving kids was content to stay inside when he could.

The January Thaw came twice – both the week before my birthday and the week after. I don’t remember all the specific weather details, but somewhere in there, between the rain and thawing, it snowed enough that we had to shovel the roof, brush off the car, and plow the driveway several times.

The first week of February, I let my kids skip school one day to ski a foot of new powder. When I tossed that idea out to my husband, feeling a bit guilty about the missing-school part, he was immediately on board (although, sadly, he still had to go to work). We only get so many powder days in a winter – or a lifetime – after all. The kids dragged me through every puffy-with-new-snow glade they could find, and we stayed out well into the afternoon.

I guess it was good we had that day, because this Tuesday I wore my rain pants and muck boots to the mountain for my coaching gig. Out of a small vacation week group, I had only two intrepid 7-year-olds join me for a morning of slushy-icy runs and wet chairlift rides. As we went in for our mid-morning break, I wrung the water out of my sopping mittens.

The kids didn’t seem to mind. They chatted happily on the chairlift, practiced the rainy day drills I assigned them, and skimmed cheerfully through slushy puddles to get from one place to the next.

The last three years, we’ve had similarly wacky winter weather during the two weeks of February break that are traditionally the busiest ski weeks of the season. Last year, for the first week, when out-of-state skiers are on vacation, we had fresh snow and beautiful weather. The New Hampshire kids got rain and ice the following week, but they didn’t batt an annoyed eyelash.

I have a photograph, somewhere, of my crew from two years ago standing in a deep puddle at the top of a chairlift. They gleefully slid through that puddle – and another one at the bottom of another lift – every run that day.

I’m glad the kids go with the flow, and I try to match their enthusiasm for skiing in the rain. But maybe they don’t mind because it’s such a regular occurrence in their young skiing lives.

I can remember only a handful of rainy ski days in my entire childhood. Tuesday one of the other coaches, a guy who’s on the hill six days a week, said it was his eleventh day this season skiing in the rain. Rain ponchos and serious rain pants – like the kind fishermen wear – have been added to many a ski coach’s wardrobe.

My own kids, like the good New Englanders they are, will ski in just about any kind of weather: howling wind, 40 below, sleet, snow, ice, sunshine. But like me, they are dismayed by the recurring winter thaws that no longer stick to a few days of January.

“This is sad,” my 9-year-old proclaimed Wednesday morning, as she exited the house jacketless and looked out on the snow-less field and the mud bog of our driveway.

All I could do was agree – and hope for another swing toward winter before spring sets in for good.

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 23, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

No-break February

“What day is it?” my groggy children mumble from the jumble of covers lately when I rouse them in the mornings. “Do we have school or skiing?”

Depending on the answer – and despite the fact my kids like both of those things – there is either disgruntled grumbling or a contented harumph sighed with the waking-up stretch.

This view from this "office" never gets old.

I have a distinct late-childhood memory of standing at the end of the driveway, skis and gear bag in hand, so early one winter morning that I watched the sun’s first pink glow while I waited for my lift to a ski race. I have non-racing skiing friends who were raised with the importance of being at the mountain for first chair drilled into them over many winters of pre-dawn wakeup calls.

Early mornings are simply part of the skiing game.

We are past the midway mark of ski season, at that divergent point that comes with every season: by now we are firmly settled into the winter routine, but fatigue is creeping in. I think that’s why schools schedule February break here – so we can all take a deep breath, pause, and regroup.

For some, that break means a trip to Disney World or some beach far south of here or a tropical cruise. For my family, February break means sleeping in an extra half hour, since the lifts don’t open until 9 o’clock next week. 

February is for skiing, and this month often features the best skiing of the season. Already this February, local skiers have enjoyed deep powder, firm corduroy, and spring-like conditions. We’ve had dumping snow, sunny skies, and even a bit of – ugh – rain. It’s like a whole ski season of variability wrapped into 28 short days.

Next week it won’t matter what day it is; we’ll be off to the ski hill bright and early every morning. That is, assuming everyone stays healthy.

Last year my kids kicked off school vacation week with a three-way case of strep throat. Some may call that good timing, having an off week to recoup. But there is very little couch-sitting around our house between the end of November and the middle of April. (We’re actually not big fans of couch-sitting in any season.)

The Crud hit when I was smack in the middle of two straight weeks of coaching. Thank goodness for a Nana who believes she is invincible in the face of germs. She took my sick kids until the antibiotics kicked in, at which point they were back on the slopes. By the end of that week, though, I was hit with a can’t-get-out-of-bed variety of sick.

This year I am trying to pace myself – and the kids. I nag them constantly to wash their hands, keep said hands away from faces, take their daily vitamins. We eat lots of vitamin C-rich foods. We go to bed early.

There is skiing to be had, after all, and while fatigue may be creeping in during this mid-winter madness, so is the awareness that we are on the waning side of ski season.

In the corporate world, the proverbial early bird may get the figurative worm. In the ski world, the early riser gets first chair, which means fresh tracks on a powder day, smooth corduroy on all the others. We’ll take our downtime in April.

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 Feb. 24, 2017 issue 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.

Winter Hardy

I’ve brushed a new layer of fluff off the windshield just about every morning for the past two weeks. My husband has taken to dropping the plow nearly each trip into or out of the driveway, scraping away the snow that has fallen since the truck’s last passage. I’ve lost track of the number of days that have started off with temperatures well below zero and barely warmed.

It’s Winter, all right, and it looks like she’s settled in, which is just fine by me.

It takes a good dose of New England hardiness to survive a winter like this. At least to survive it with some sense of good cheer. There is shoveling and roof clearing and endless plowing and firewood carrying. If you’re lucky (and smart) there is also skiing and snowshoeing and ice skating and sledding and snow fort building. My kids (and I, too) lamented the December rain and the loss of white from our landscape. Cold and brown is no good for a winter-loving soul. Cold and snow is an entirely different, and much happier, thing.

It seems while we head into the white looking for fun, many animals – the hardiest of New Englanders – have hunkered down since the deep snowfall. A few weeks ago our fields were laced with deer tracks and the hopping marks of red squirrels and the canine paw prints of coyotes, along with fox and the elusive bobcat. Lately, however, when I strap on the cross-country skis for a mind-clearing trek through the field and woods, I see far fewer tracks. A solitary deer trail emerging from the trees here, a snowshoe hare track bounding across the path there. The garden compost heap, which had been visited regularly by a bold doe, has been left alone for days, except by the crows.

On the coldest days, even the ever-cheery chickadees wait until well after I’ve had my own breakfast to visit the feeder. A pair of blue jays often sit puffed against the chill on bare branches nearby, their brightness almost startling against a backdrop of white. The other day a barred owl perched atop a dead birch tree in the field, head turning methodically in search of a meal, feathers ruffled by the wind. Eventually the owl gave up and flew away; there were no small rodents moving through the deep snow below.

The only animal who seems unbothered by the cold and deepening snow is the porcupine, whose trough-like trail through the woods crosses the human-made path of snowshoes and skis just where it has the past few winters. Scraping teeth marks appear like brush strokes across several smallish yellow birch trees along the trail, revealing where the porcupines ate the inner bark, a favorite winter meal.

I know there are plenty of people who hunker down, too, closed up in their warm houses waiting for spring through the long northern winter. And there are others whose children have had far too many snow days (while here we’ve had zero snow days and still plenty of snow), wreaking havoc on the already complicated logistics of family schedules. In Boston and other cities, they are running out of places to put all the snow; commuting is an ongoing nightmare, and this winter is a multifaceted headache there.

Here, it is just winter, to be endured or enjoyed, depending on your perspective. Sure, plowing and shoveling become tiresome when they are daily chores, but all that pushed-up snow makes a great foundation for a snow fort. Frigid temperatures can certainly wear a person down after a while, but that cold makes the cocoa all the better. Driving through snow is not much fun, but skiing in it is pure, invigorating bliss.

In mid-February, the days are noticeably longer than a few weeks ago. To some, that means spring is coming. To the rest of us, it means more daylight for basking in Winter’s white glow.

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 13, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.