If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Many Vermonters have been complaining since the start of 2010 about lack of snow, and some of us have even been envying the poor folks in Maryland, Virgina, the nation's capital, and similar places who aren't usually visited by snowstorms.

We have so resigned ourselves to no winter that we have actually been talking about Spring , not just thinking about it.

Still, we were hoping for a taste of winter one of these days.


What we did not expect was winter all at once.

Nor did we expect heavy wet snow the likes of which has not been seen in several years.

The snow started Monday night, and I awoke Tuesday morning to this       

That's 8 inches or more on those lower branches.












There were snow hats on the garden stalks.  



















And the road looked like this:










If you make that picture bigger, that is 12" of snow on the mailbox.


Starting about 7 am, I dug out the car.

I went to work after my neighbor came with his plow. I returned home in the afternoon and dug through yet another foot of still-heavier snow to get to my doors.

Daytime temperatures went above freezing and the snow is sliding off the roof with great WHUMPS and THUMPS. The snow that's fallen in front of the woodpile is a good four feet high.

The snow is so wet that when I look in the snowplow pile by the road, I can see blue inside the cracks in the pile, from all the water in the snow.

This snowstorm is old already.