Yes, by now everyone has heard about the snow in the northeast.  We left for Rowe in the morning on Friday after finding someone to clear our driveway in Enfield after that fateful event.  It snowed, it was a blizzard but waking up on Saturday morning with the wind still blowing and it being in the mid teens in temperature we stayed inside next to a fire.  Reports began to come in from the daughters – one in Enfield, one in Boston about the amount of snow and their cars being buried or nearly invisible.  They had their shovels and food, hadn’t lost power, were working their way through the mess with everyone else around them.  What they had in southern and eastern MA and CT was not really what we had in Rowe.  We had a good snowstorm – anywhere from 15 to 18 inches of white, fluffy snow, what they had was monumental.  The problems in those urban areas were compounded by an inability of the cities and states to handle the amount of snow they received.  I can tell you there are a lot of trucks today with blown transmissions that failed the task of plowing out streets, parking lots and driveways.

Sunday morning the winds had died and the temperature rose to a balmy 30 degrees.  We decided to get the snowshoes out.  We use beautiful vintage models made in Maine in years gone by.  The problem was that my leather bindings had broken beyond repair over 2 years ago.  I had scoured the internet and found someone out west that made bindings for these in neoprene.  They’d been kicking around the house for almost 2 years since there really hadn’t been enough snow to take them out (or I was too lazy to rebind them).  I was also a little skeptical that they would be as good as the old ones and was really contemplating dusting off the old leather working skills to just make another pair.  The weather was just too nice to watch Bill snowshoe away and sit in the house so I dug those neoprene bindings out.  What a chore that turned out to be.  The instructions were vague at best.  I’m pretty good at reverse engineering something but none of the new straps were marked so I had to guess.  Fitting my boots into the bindings on a table was a lot easier than doing it in the snow and finally we were ready to go.

Chester went with us, the little dogs stayed behind.  We have learned from experience that if you take them out in deep snow with snowshoes all they do is walk on the backs of your shoes, not fun or funny. So Sophie spent the entire time we were gone looking out the window from the back of the chair at a snow bank barking – she couldn’t even see us.  Chester took this opportunity to bring a tennis ball and played an extended game of fetch.  Extended because he continually lost that ball in the snow and would take forever to find it.

It was nice to walk out to the wood lot, a place we have difficulty getting to in other seasons due to beaver activity.  It was so quiet and beautiful out there.  The only noise was an occasional crow or chickadee with the sound of the snow beneath our shoes.

This is winter as it should be, outdoors, quiet.  And those new bindings?  Spectacular!