February

It is February. Just like that. I walk back across the driveway to the cabin from my office over the garage at five thirty, and daylight still blankets the sky. In another month, we will be thinking about resetting the light timers. I am writing this on Wednesday. Punxsutawney Phil is scheduled to be lifted from his tree stump tomorrow morning to look for his shadow, with an arm around his middle and a hand under his rump, whereupon we will know if winter is set to carry on for six weeks—in Pennsylvania.

On the banks of the pond in New Hampshire, winter just got here. Punxsutawney Phil would be struggling to crawl through a foot of heavy snow with an icy crust we can nearly walk on. The rhododendron leaves are folded up very tight this morning. I could pluck one and slide it into a cigar tube. It is forecasted to be twelve degrees tonight, and the temperature is headed down for the weekend. Saturday, the high will be six degrees. Nose pinching cold. This is good because, at those temperatures, I do expect to be able to walk across the top of the snow pulling a cart of firewood to replenish supplies in the basement.

We have gone through more wood than usual by this time of year, heating the cabin through four separate power outages. The last one was a week ago, a shorter downtime of twenty-four hours compared to the two and three-day interruptions that came before, beginning around Christmas. The problem has been the heaviness of the snow. Very wet, large flakes accumulate on the branches, weighing them down, eventually causing many to break. The scene it creates, however, is magical. For a few days, we occupied the world of Zhivago. We lived in a snow palace decorated to the top in white. It could have been Narnia. A faun might have come trotting down the driveway under the canopy. I can share a picture of our lamppost, looking as if it were buried in meringue.

The biggest concern with power outages is propane. We have a generator. It guzzles between two and three gallons of propane an hour, which compares to the average of about eight gallons per day under normal conditions this time of year, relying on wood stoves for part of our heat. If the power goes out with less than half our two one-hundred-gallon tanks remaining, and it is windy, and if the storm is going to rage into the night when it will not be safe for utility crews to work, and persist for a while the next day making clean-up slow and difficult; and if hundreds of customers are out of power, including those who live in built-up neighborhoods, with children, commutes, and more important obligations than may appear to apply to a cabin on a pond in the woods—we start to worry about running out of propane before help arrives. This is the scenario that has replayed itself four times this season.

Otherwise, no problem. The generator runs about everything when it is on, which is maybe six or seven hours a day (eighteen to twenty gallons of propane). We cook on propane, the wood stoves easily maintain a sixty-eight to seventy-degree temperature, and hopefully, the internet persists, which it has, so far.

I made three trips to Boston last week, where there is no snow—enough to speak of. The line between the snow haves and have-nots is abrupt this year. Snow on the ground ends soon after crossing the border into Massachusetts. Lunenburg, on the border with New Hampshire, was only partially snow-covered, and poor Lunenburg is reliably pummeled by weather. It seems to be on the dividing line, north and south, between encroaching systems—meaning, if the forecasters say the storm will stay to the south of us, Lunenburg gets it. If the storm comes through us, Lunenburg still gets it. It suffers particularly in ice storms. I know this because I have traveled through Lunenburg, to and from Monadnock, for years. It has cute white houses with green doors and screen porches, a country market, churches, a bandstand on the town green. And a hearty appetite for weather.

It was a slow start to winter in November and December. It was warm deep into the fall. That tells you winter is going to linger. It is here, finally, and will stay like your old college roommate did on the couch. There may even be a dreaded April snowstorm.

No one has their arm around my middle, feeding me carrots for this opinion. I am no expert. But we will see what the Big Guy says tomorrow.

[Update: Phil saw his shadow. Six more weeks of winter. I am betting with the rodent.]