Last week, winter raged with wind and snow, making fences grow shorter and hay feeders disappear. The distant mountains were white on white and the snow plow left a swirl of snow behind it. Friends and relatives sent messages that read, “I know you’ll be glad when spring arrives.” or “Stay inside where it is warm.” They do not understand that this is Vermont winter and that welove it. My husband and I chose to move here nearly 30 years ago. We chose to be in a winter place with snow. We embrace winter and revel in it. Our children have grown up knowing the beauty of snow and the feel of winter on their cheeks.
Join Anna as she captures the beauty of last week’s storm, visit her blog to see her beautiful photographs and poetical descriptions of winter’s storm…
It is cold again, and suddenly overnight there is snow on snow on snow, the way I remember it from when I was small and our little blue house would get buried right up to its shiny tin eaves…. I go out with Kai, and the woods are silent under the snow. Everything is silent–muffled, wrapped close in all this falling, swathed in this crystallization of water and wind that has stilled now and left us gasping in its wake. It falls, huge and perfect, each snowflake a cluster of smaller snowflakes….
Photography by Anna Goodling
…In the paddock, the sheep stand quiet. Last spring’s lambs gambol and wade, up to their bellies, forging into the drifts and searching my hands for apple slices. When the snowfall thickens, they look at me, curious, but do not scurry for shelter until we open a new bale of hay, fill the long feeder in the run-in…
Anna clears the driveway.
…As I work, my hands grow warm and rough, old callouses waking to the shovel. The cross around my neck dances in the cold, and I know again what it is to realize, all of a sudden, in the pause between a taken gasp of air and the long, slow letting out, that I am alive….
