Winter started coyly, as if it was trying to charm us into embracing the cold. The first snow of the year fell on Halloween. This melted quickly and we didn’t see snow again until Thanksgiving day, at my parents’ place in Ithaca. I started to think God was teasing us by playing to the American holiday schedule, and it reminded me of a childhood mystery – the only time I ever saw snow flakes fall on my home town in San Diego was on a Valentine’s day.
The kids’ first reaction to the snow was to eat as much of it as possible. One big white snow cone!! It took them a few times to realize that despite looking pure white, snow from the car’s bumper or the ground near the chicken coop were not the tasty-est freeze.
There we were, waltzing our way through the season and wondering how Maine got its reputation for harsh winters when a storm came and dumped several feet. Jonah rejoiced at his first cancelled school day, and the kids spent the day home watching movies (what else to do when you still need to work?). Apparently Nora the noravirus doesn’t care about school cancellations or lost days of work, since she decided to visit us the very next day. Zach was out on his weekly expedition to Massachusetts, after a night of holding two childrens’ heads over bowls I was groggily shoveling snow off our car and out of the chickens’ run. The path I shoveled from the back door of our trailer to the henhouse looked like a tunnel. Once some ground had been cleared in their run, the chickens decided to venture out. At least they’re smart enough not to step into snow that is taller than they are. One of them was so grateful that she laid an egg right there on the snowy ground. Either they’re not very bright or not very maternal. But why is it that the golf ball we put in their nest boxes to encourage them to lay their eggs there keeps winding up on the opposite corner of the five-foot hen house? It’s heavy, and to get it out of the nest box they have to launch it over a 2” ledge. It’s not as though they have hands to pick the thing up and throw it. There’s only one possible explanation: our chickens know how to golf.
One sign that you’re in a small town is that your kids show up in the newspaper even if they haven’t done anything wrong. We’ve only been here 5 months, and between the two of them our kids’ photos have already been in print 3 times. One is a photo of Zora sitting in a fire engine, quoted as asking the firefighter to “go fast.” The most recent one is a shot of Jonah with his kindergarden teacher, brandishing an award for “courage.” In the photo he has a huge scab over one of his eyes from having slipped on my parents’ stairs and cut his brow. In any case, it goes nicely with the courage award, which he actually received for having moved across the country. Folks here think it’s pretty courageous for a Californian to venture so far North. I think they are wondering if we’re going to “stick,” like these first snows.
I bottled and labeled our first ever batch of hard cider. It’s mellowed a bit now, and tastes a bit like a dry white wine with the scent of apples. I wasn’t sure at first but now quite like it. It may finally be good enough to take over to the folks who sold us the apples. Their last name is French, like so many people here, and I sometimes wish more of the French culture had stuck around. Just a bit north of here in Quebec is an amazing band, Le Vent du Nord, which plays some of the best folk music I’ve ever heard. We saw them at the Bangor folk festival and since then I’ve been hooked on the fiery, melancholy reels of Quebequois music. The French Canadian fiddlers tap with their feet (mat-a-pat, mat-a-pat) as they play, and the round tones of the fiddle carved up with “les pieds” creates such an infectious rhythm that it’s almost impossible to take sitting down. Hence the saying that the way to kill a Quebequois is to tie his feet to the chair and play fiddle music at him.
Zach is working furiously at his new job, in the midst of the end-of-the year crunch for spend-it-or-lose-it grant funding. I have been keeping busy working on a database, and just finished driving down to Boston to present the first draft. In November we surprised my parents at their retirement from Cornell Biology, sneaking up the night before and staying at aunt Wendy’s place. The little powerpoint presentation I did on my parents as a species went over so well that I was invited to do it again the next night at the Lab of Ornithology’s board meeting, where my mother was also being congratulated on her retirement. The board is fortunate to have many luminaries, including Hank Paulson (the former treasury secretary), the former chair of BP, and heads of major foundations. So now to add to the list of odd things I have done recently I can add: conducting a presentation attended by a (former) US treasury secretary. He even laughed at my sex jokes.
We’re digging in now and will be home for the holidays. Zach’s mother Patty has baked about six different kinds of cookies and more are on the way, as well as my parents’ own Christmas bread. Between that, Winter Lager, and our homemade toffee, I hope we’ll put on enough padding to help us through the next several months of relentless cold and deep snow, which I hear will not start melting until April. What started as flirtation is about to turn into a committed relationship – the winter is going to stick, for a long time. At least the days will start getting longer soon! Look for the eclipse of the moon that is supposed to take place the evening of the solstice.
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