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.

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.