View from the Mountain

The First Snow

I have seen a lot of first snows. I have also gone through a lot of years when there was never a first snow. Snow is an unusual thing. How it impacts your life depends a lot on where you live. We have lived in lots of places so our snow memories span everything from flurries to blizzards just as you might imagine.

Back in 1960 when I was in elementary school in Lewisville, North Carolina, I had my first serious experience with snow. In March 1960, it started on my birthday and snowed three straight Wednesdays. We hardly went to school that month. Those storms must have created a powerful pull on me. It took me at least twenty-seven years before I had enough snow to move back from Canada and end my sixteen years north of the border.

The first snow in New Brunswick often was a pretty serious one. It is the land of real snow. In November 1974, when we first moved to our farm, the snow was already on the ground. It never left until the middle of May the next year. You could drop something on the ground in October and not see it again until late the next spring.

That first winter we did a lot of snowshoeing and learned about breaking trail in very deep snow.  I had a ball with my cross-country skis on those beautiful trails. We only had a handful of cattle so there was time to enjoy the snow. We did buy a tractor mounted snowblower and it was to become an essential part of our lives.

Most mornings during the winter on the farm, I started the day by shoveling snow. It was not unusual for it to snow five or six inches during the night. The snowplows did not even bother with that tiny amount of snow. When it did not snow, there was usually snow sliding off the roof of the house. One way or the other you ended up shoveling for most of the winter. You learned that keeping up with the snow was a Canadian virtue that made life a lot easier in the snowy north.

Fast forward to 1989, and we are quickly approaching our first winter in Roanoke, Virginia. We have been back in the states for a couple of years after spending three years in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It started snowing on our mountainside above the Roanoke Valley in November just before Thanksgiving and the snow stayed until after Christmas.  We thought we were back in Canada. The road got so icy, everyone in the neighborhood banded together and chipped a single tire track down our half-mile long hill.  That was not our snowiest winter in Roanoke but it was a memorable one with an early first snow. We did live on a very steep hill which often frustrated even the VDOT snow plows.

After we moved to the North Carolina coast in 2006, we waited almost three years for our first snow. We never really got a lot of snow on the Carolina coast but it was enough to scare away anyone who feared snow flakes. I hauled my snow scoop that was so essential in Roanoke all the way to the coast. I used it once and that time I even had to dig out my hiking boots because my Crocs were too cold in the snow.

We caught the last of the winter here in the North Carolina foothills but there was only a dusting of snow before the grass started turning green. I suspect that might be the rule rather than the exception now that our winters have warmed. We certainly will not see one like the first snow in September 1973 that welcomed my wife to Nova Scotia.

If you are really hooked on snow, these pictures from December 2009, show that Roanoke has a pretty good history of snow. We even had some bigger ones that this April dusting.

I had happy to report that Highland County, Virginia, had its first snow of the season today, November 2, 2021. It came earlier than the first snow for many of my friends in Canada. Weather can be tricky.

Last Mowing Revisited

Eighteen years ago, I wrote a post, the Last Mowing.  We had been living in Roanoke, up on the mountain for fifteen years.  It was hard to get used to mowing the yard in December after years in New Brunswick where the snow could come in November and cover the ground until mid-May. 

Except for the green grass in December, there  were parts of living on the mountain that reminded us of our years in Canada.  The sometimes snowy weather was one thing and the friendly people were the other.

When you come over our hill after dark, it is almost like an approach to the airport. The city is spread out before you, street lights blinking, and buildings glowing. There are not many views in the world that can compete with it.

Being on top of the world at the end of the road seems to make us closer. Perhaps we have been drawn closer by the few times that the county has forgotten to plow the snow off the road in the winter.

Flatlanders, that is anyone who does not live on the hill, often ask how we get up the hill in the winter. Actually getting up the hill has rarely been the problem. All of us at the top have at least one four wheel drive. It takes less than one winter to realize that going down the hill is far more exciting than going up. I have been fortunate to have a job that allows me to work at home when necessary. That means that snowy morning’s entertainment usually is watching the folks who have to go to work try to get down the hill safely.

Our  first year on the mountain, we got an early coat of ice.  Everyone on the hill banded together and we cut a single tire track all the way to the bottom of the hill.  It was the first of many weather adventures on the hill.  We saw snow storms that were worthy of Canada.

It was a good place to live  and while we lived there, those of us at the top of the hill were a tight-knit group.  and I remember more parties than disagreements.  After we moved from the hill,  most friends drifted away but we remain close to one family that grew up with our children.

A lot of water has passed under me in skiff and kayak in the fifteen years after we moved from Roanoke and lived on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast.  My crocs also covered many miles of sandy beach. Yet I still fondly remember the years when we partied on our decks whenever given the slightest chance. There was no close neighborhood group in our coastal subdivision. I will blame it on the lack of any steep hills.

After fifteen years in the marsh, we moved from the coast during the pandemic.  Selling, buying, and moving during a pandemic are not the easiest things to do, but with lots of help, we managed to find a nice neighborhood less than half an hour from where I grew up in North Carolina’s Piedmont. We even found a home with a real backyard instead of a marsh or a ravine.

While my family has deep roots here, many who have been close to us are much older even than us.  The younger generation has their own busy lives and there is little to connect us with the neighborhood. Last year none of our immediate neighbors even attended the annual neighborhood HOA picnic with free (well it is covered by your dues) barbecue.

When we lived at the coast, we had a wonderful church family but we lost that when we moved.  Because of the pandemic, we remain video-church goers.  If the pandemic recedes further, perhaps we will find another church family.

Age, changes due to the way people live, some driven by the pandemic and even political divisions make it harder to connect.

Much like it was in early December eighteen years ago in Roanoke, we just had our last mowing of the yard here in North Carolina’s Piedmont hill country. Our fescue yard is still green like our bluegrass one in Roanoke so there is a chance it will be mowed again.

Our yards might be much the same green in December but somehow it feels like our world has changed.   In is unlikely we will have as close a group of friends as we did in Roanoke both on the hill and in the flatlands. Having children in school makes it easy to have common ground.  The Roanoke friends will have to share a spot in our fond memories of the friends we made during our years on the farm and in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I have always believed that  there are good people everywhere, you just have to work harder in some places to find them than others.  I have seen nothing to change my mind in our latest move. We are finding our new ones, one at a time.

Mowing Your Way Through Life

I am not sure not how people managed in the first half of the twentieth century before there were yards to connect them to the soil around their homes. I suspect that they were working in their gardens and fields. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards had become important. The condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry's fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.

Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed in and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. The second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few backyards in my life away from home.

Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life from the world of well-manicure yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.

For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.

One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have.

Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mower of choice, choosing the spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer.

When our current mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home. 

 

 

Christmas Traditions -The Chris Moose

Christmas is a very personal holiday sometimes surrounded with festive communities.
 
In 1973, my wife and I had our first Christmas together on the Nova Scotia coast. Thirty-three years later in 2006, we were back on the coast. This time we were enjoying the holiday season on the North Carolina coast many miles south of Nova Scotia. It was an easy decision to haul a Crab Pot Christmas tree from our second home and back to Roanoke, Virginia, our permanent home from 1989 -2012.

Our Crab Pot tree was the source of much interest in Roanoke, and at least a couple of visitors to our coastal second home after the 2006 holiday season took crab pot trees home. We kept crab pot trees shining brightly in our coastal home for fifteen years.

We left our Crab Pot trees and the coast behind when we moved back to my home turf in North Carolina's rolling hills just west of Winston-Salem.

One of the most interesting coastal Christmas celebrations that we found during our time on the coast takes place in Rodanthe and Salvo near the Chicamacomico Life Saving Station. 

For over one hundred years residents in the area have celebrated Christmas both on its normal December 25th day and Old Christmas which is celebrated eleven days later in the first week of January.  Old Christmas comes from the days before the Gregorian calendar which removed eleven days from the year.

The Old Christmas celebration starts with an Oyster Roast, music, bonfires, and the ritual visitation of Old Buck, a bull like, costumed creation which legend has it roams the woods during the year and comes out only during the Old Christmas festivities. We did not see Old Buck while we lived on the coast, but we enjoyed many oyster roasts.

We lived in Nova Scotia on the Fundy coast a for a couple of years and later in Halifax another two years.  One of the Christmas traditions there and in Newfoundland was that of Mummers.  During the time from after Christmas Day until Old Christmas, costumed visitors knock on doors while singing songs and hoping to be invited in for a drink or some food.  There is even a Mummers’ song by the Great Big Sea, a Canadian folk-rock band from Newfoundland and Labrador.  This is part of it.

Hark, what's the noise out by the porch door? Dear Granny, there's mummers, there's twenty or more. Her old weathered face lightens up with a grin. Any mummers, nice mummers 'lowed in? Ah, come in lovely mummers, don't bother the snow, We'll wipe up the water sure after you go. And sit if you can upon some mummer's knee. We'll see if we knows who ye be. Ah, there's big ones and small ones, tall ones and thin, There's boys dressed as women and girls dressed as men…

In some places there is a tradition that if the host cannot guess the identity of the group they have to join them in their merry making.

My mother before her death used to tell us about Christmas on Styers Mill pond in Yadkin County just north of where we now live in Davie County.  Christmas was not so much about the gifts as about the celebration of the season.  She was born in 1910 and remembered most of Christmas treats being fruit, nuts or candy.  Some clothes or other useful items might be given, but toys as Christmas gifts were as rare as automobiles for transportation were on the dirt roads of the day.

One of the special traditions was the cutting of a country ham which had been specially prepared for the season. My mother talked of her father driving wagons onto the ice of the mill pond to harvest ice for their underground sawdust-insulated ice house, but most of the meat had to be eaten fresh or cured. 

Late fall and the winter holiday season was a time of plenty since the weather was cool enough for the seasonal killing of the hogs.  Mother claimed that hogs were especially good when fattened mostly from a barrel where kitchen scraps were mixed with water and some grain.  Somehow slopping the hogs makes a little more sense when viewed from that perspective.

I suspect my mother’s childhood had a lot to do with the Christmas preparations that she made when she became an adult.

For years until she got into under late eighties, Christmas was a time of baking and candy making.  She would do a dozen or more of real fruit cakes which were well laced with brandy.  There would also be fudge, soft mints, applesauce cakes, spicy cheddar cheese straws, and finally what became another family tradition, peanut brittle.  Presents were often hand crocheted hats or afghans.

Even today, we try to hunt down some raw peanuts and dig out the granite slab that we inherited from my mother and make a batch or two of peanut brittle when we gather for Christmas and the weather turns cold.  Not surprisingly Christmas breakfast is usually a meal of country ham.  In a further nod to tradition our eldest daughter often surprises us with cross stitch or knitted gifts.

While some Christmas traditions come from the countries where our families originated, many are a medley that families develop on their own as they move through different areas.

I grew up near Winston-Salem which has strong Moravian traditions.  Moravian Sugar Cake and Cookies were part of our holidays.  I can still remember a trip to an Old Salem Christmas Candlelight service, and of course when we moved to our farm in Canada we took along a Moravian Christmas Star with its twenty-six points.  It was not long before we had to import a few for neighbors along with some Moravian Cookies.

Our first Christmas in Canada along the shore of the Bay of Fundy helped us pick up a few more Maritime traditions.  That year I had pickled herring as one of our holiday meals.  Many of the local Nova Scotians had lobster as their holiday meal.  That first Christmas was something of a lean one with little extra money to spare so we had to create almost all of our Christmas decorations.

We made some of our decorations out of salt dough and painted them with water colors.  We also did many hand-carved wooden ornaments for our tree.  There was one special ornament that ended up on that first coastal Nova Scotia tree.

I had stared out trying to carve a reindeer out of some scraps left over from the pine paneling that we were putting on the walls of our farm house.  It did not take long to figure out that Moose antlers would be easier to carve, so thus in the winter of 1971, the Christmas Moose or Chris Moose for short was born.

That winter strings of popcorn and cranberries joined our handmade ornaments on a fir cut from the back of our farm.  Since that time we have collected unusual ornaments, and not surprisingly I have received a veritable herd of ornaments, with each Christmas Moose more unique than the last one. 

We started our children early on their own ornament collection, but perhaps the best part of the tradition of Chris Moose has been giving to each of our three children their very own Christmas Moose which I carved by hand.  As each of our children moved out on their own, they got a wooden Moose ornament which was also accompanied by a letter which took as long to write as it did to carve the Chris Moose.

I actually took the time to cut and cure the wood for each Moose from the back of our property on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia.  In our family getting your own Chris Moose was symbolic of growing up and being able to develop your own Christmas traditions.

The days of this Christmas season have flown by as quickly as have our many Christmas seasons since that first one in Nova Scotia.  The memories of the season swirl like snow on a winter day in the north country.  I remember my father telling me of the salt fish and oysters from the NC coast that were always his special treats for the holidays. I am pleased that my holiday memories now include steamed oysters.

I remember my mother's parties with real eggnog and I even remember my first train set and going to cut a Christmas tree in the woods of Lewisville with my one-armed Uncle Joe. I had to drag it out myself. Later after we moved back from Canada and were living on the mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia, I remember our children coming home for the holidays.  My wife's famous clam chowder was always the beginning of the holiday feast for me.  This year we are having a pot roast.  Somehow salt cod cakes got voted down.  Imagine that.

Still we are making some new memories and I hope everyone will have some as nice as ours.

 

The First Cold Day

Living on the North Carolina coast, we always considered the first cold day to be the one when we had to give up wearing shorts. When I lived on the farm in Tay Creek, the first cold day was when I had to start wearing mittens. That was actually a whole lot colder than you might think. I rarely used mittens until it got below zero.

Growing up in North Carolina, cold is not something you think about very much. To me it was cold when the red dirt banks sparkled with frost crystals. As I got older and went winter camping with our Boy Scout Troop 752 at Camp Raven Knob, I got to know real cold. There is nothing like rain and chilly weather to make you appreciate a nice warm home. Still it was not serious cold.

The first serious cold that I remember was on a trip freshman year from Cambridge to Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. I cannot remember why we went but I do remember it being minus twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit the Saturday morning we left. Fortunately, serious cold does not last very long if you are in a functioning car. Still it left an impression.  While temperatures in Cambridge got down into single digits, they could not come close to Hanover.

Sometime in my college years I caught a snow-loving virus. That and a obsession with having some land of my own led me to head off to Maritime Canada. In the early seventies land was cheap in Nova Scotia and life seemed like a throwback to life in the fifties in the United States.

The old house that I bought on the shore of the Bay of Fundy was not exactly the warmest house around. In spite of lots of efforts and a newly built fireplace, it could still be cold especially since the wind often howled in St. Croix Cove where the house was.  That part of Nova Scotia was famous for storms that went from rain to snow to sleet to freezing rain back to snow accompanied by bitter cold.

Fortunately for the snow loving part of me, the lousy Nova Scotia weather was also bad for cattle so my wife and I decided to move to New Brunswick. Without much thought other than falling in love with a farm, we ended up in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the middle of New Brunswick's snow belt. Our first winter we had over twenty feet of snow. We also got to endure minus twenty-eight Fahrenheit that first year. In January of 1982, when our youngest daughter was born, the thermometer dipped to minus forty.

Most years in New Brunswick the first real  cold came in the first week or so December just about the time busy mothers needed to finish up their Christmas shopping. You could tell the real cold weather had arrived when on successive days the previous day's low would become the next day's high temperature. Things would continue that way until it bottomed out at something seriously below zero Fahrenheit.

I endured some bitter cold on our New Brunswick farm but I doubt that I ever got colder than when I went fishing in a skiff on the rainy, wind morning of October 25, 2005 when the temperature was in the forties. When we finished fishing that morning and I was dropped off at the dock, it only took me about a block of walking before I realized that I could not feel my extremities. There is nothing like being completely soaked in the wind to make cold penetrate to your bones. I had to spend some serious time in a very hot tub bath before I recovered. It is no surprise that I did not feel cold while I was catching all the fish. That fishing trip remains one of my coldest memories next to sitting on a brick hard seat in my pickup at minus forty.

I guess that I am getting soft. I now consider today our first cold day of 2021. I don't think we broke fifty Fahrenheit. I was wearing shorts when I went out to retrieve the paper but as the day failed to improve, I changed to blue jeans. I even put on socks.

 

 

 

 

 

Waiting for the Big Snowstorm

Snowstorms can be a peaceful interruption to modern life as long as you have power, remain healthy and do not feel the need to prove the worth of your seldom used four-wheel-drive vehicle. Most snow in North Carolina east of the mountains rarely stays on the ground more than a few days. Certainly here on the coast of North Carolina, snow is a minor worry compared to hurricanes. I would much rather be waiting for a snowstorm than a hurricane.

When we lived on a farm in Canada (one of our barns pictured), getting ready for a snowstorm was not a big deal unless it was the first snowstorm of the year.  The first storm was a challenge because if you left something on the ground before that first storm, you might not see it again until the spring thaw.  After our first storm, most storms usually just brought a yawn unless they were classed as blizzards.  We lived in a land of real snow which means the plows did not even bother with snow unless it was more than six inches. Keeping a clean driveway was a virtue since no one wanted a permanent skating rink for a driveway.

After coming to live on the side of a mountain near Roanoke, Virginia, we learned it was still prudent to clean your driveway there because the snow and ice could last for up to a month. Snowstorms did force us into a routine.  We always filled the cars with gas and made sure we had a little cash and some eggs with bacon in the fridge. Our mountain in Roanoke was steep enough that VDOT would sometimes appear to forget that we existed. Once back in 2009 we waited for there days before VDOT sent a road grader to clean our hill. For many years while living on the hill, we had a small SUV which I equipped with chains on all four wheels.  I often ferried people up and down the hill while retrieving our important morning newspapers which whenever the road was snow-covered would end up dumped at the bottom of the hill.

It used to frustrate me to no end since during my farming days I had equipment that could have easily cleared our half-mile hill.  There was little chance even in Canada of running into a snowstorm that my ring-chain equipped tractor with snow blower could not handle. The big tractor could cut through drifts over three feet and blow the snow over one hundred feet.  Each storm and we had many of them, I cleared a mile long road back to our cattle so I could haul them a two thousand pound round bale of hay each day.

Living on our often-ignored by VDOT side of the mountain in Roanoke taught me patience that few of my neighbors in New Brunswick ever needed. I spoiled them.  As soon as the cattle were fed, I cleaned a few driveways after each storm. I never took money for my efforts, it was just a neighborly thing to do. In Virginia, I learned that some people's first impulse upon getting a new SUV was to find the steepest possible snow-covered hill and try to get to the top of it. In our area of Roanoke that meant our hill which was a one-half mile up the side of a mountain with a couple of curves thrown in for fun.  I should have posted a sign at the foot of the hill which read, "Getting up the hill is not the hard part, getting down is what separates the fools from the good drivers."

On really snowy days, I was fortunate in that I could work from my home and be entertained by the doctors who had to get to work no matter how bad the weather was.  Since I could look out one of our windows and see some of the worst places, I was well entertained but unfortunately, I missed some of the best shows. One doctor pulled out of his driveway once only to have his Subaru spin around on him and head downhill backward. He was a very good driver and made it all the way down without hitting any of the guard rails.  Others including more than a few snow plows were not so fortunate. Sometimes a vehicle would get stranded on the side of the road and it would appear they were frozen in a snowbank for the winter. Once the road was so slick that a neighbor left his car and walked up the hill but had to slide the final one hundred yards home on his rear. I learned long ago on the farm, that a four-wheel drive vehicle just lets you get stuck in a more inaccessible place.

So as this potentially historic storm approaches North Carolina and Virginia, my suggestions are simple. 

Hunker down and stay off the roads. The thrill of going up a big hill is not nearly as big as the heartache of having your mangled SUV towed to a repair shop after you put it in a ditch. Neither North Carolina or Virginia are Canada where putting your car into a snow-packed ditch is often a good alternative to running into another car. I did it a couple of times myself without any damage, but all I had to do was walk home and get a tractor to extricate my truck.

Just enjoy the time in front of your fireplace and if you lose Internet connectivity or your smartphone will not work, you will survive.  Read a book or go stand outside and catch a few snowflakes on your tongue and listen to the quiet.  It will be good for your soul.