From December 2019

Another old Farm Side. We are looking at another incoming snow storm right now....photos are from yesterday.

Two days before the storm. At least one college had already canceled classes.

Out in the unmown horse pasture, ungrazed since Magnum died, the frozen grass was the color of a sunburned fox’s pelt, tawny, tangled, tipped with cold rolled gold, waving in the frigid wind.

The day had dawned bright and icy. Thought was given that maybe, just maybe, it might could, possibly, be time to put up plastic on the windows that are always last. Time to get the staple gun back out.

I’m always reluctant to let go of autumn, to take that long, cold, slide down to the doldrums of winter. I try to hold it back by leaving the calendar in the office set on September, but alas, that tends to fail abysmally.

I shouldn’t be so negative. Winter is actually a great time for birding. However, in winter you have to pay to play, and the season’s coin is often painful. Frozen toes, frigid fingers, frosted, fogged-over binoculars, and other uncomfortable and annoying miseries.

It appears that the pair of Red Squirrels that has taken up residence in the honey locust tree outside the back door have neither staple gun nor rolls of plastic.

However, they seem to have a large measure of rodent ingenuity. I keep a mesh turkey bag full of wool from pretty little Echo the pet sheep, hanging next to the orange board the boss made me to feed Baltimore Orioles and Grey Catbirds in summer.

It’s a delight to photograph tiny warblers tugging earnestly at single threads of natural insulation for their nests each year.

It was not quite as delightful that cold, pre-storm day, to watch the squirrels stuffing great wads into their toothy mouths to hustle up the tree looking like furry orange Santas.

On the other hand squirrels are great planters of trees, as evidenced by the black walnut tree growing where the milk house used to stand, back when the heifer barn was full of Jerseys and the land owned by someone else.

It’s half as thick as a telephone pole and nearly up to the barn roof, but we didn’t plant it. Some enterprising rodent carried a fat nut there, probably headed for the cow barn or the old hop house, where grey squirrels love to mingle. The original trees, given to me by the first author of this column and planted a decade or several ago, are north of the driveway, a goodly distance from the barnyard. I’m not sure we need a walnut tree in that exact spot, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

Then it came. Like a sheer silver sheet, spreading relentlessly horizon-to-horizon, first a few mealy dots, then more and more, until that tawny brown grass was shrouded in white and the trees hidden from view. Within an hour the accident reports started to fly. It was really slippery stuff and the cold ground made it worse.

As the weekend progressed and inches and feet of snow fell and dozens of schools closed, we spoke among ourselves of farmers facing their work in such awful weather. I am rarely glad not to be milking cows, as our life’s work was something we both loved.

However, semi-retirement looks real good when you realize that there are no frozen water lines to thaw. No tanker to get up the hill, requiring constant plowing all through the day, sometimes starting in the wee hours just after midnight if we had an early truck.

Fast forward three days, though school closings, and road closings, and accumulations well into the double digits. Blue robin’s egg sky frosted with scarves of drift flakes. Shadows a darker blue, almost denim, stretching across the old horse pasture against the cold white ground.

The roads are mostly open, but no doubt the wind will drift some of them closed again and make it almost as hard to see as it was when the snow was falling at its heaviest.


The weather pundits got it right this time and the storm was a doozy. Do we dare hope that it got it out of its system for a while and we can look forward to nicer weather? Probably not.