Snow Days

When you live in the Northeast, you have to expect snow.  And we do expect snow - just not so much - at the end of October!  It was a bit more than we were prepared for.

This Saturday morning was a beautiful Fall day.  I was out in the garden bringing in the last of the tender plants for overwintering indoors.  Just as I finished up, the first flakes began to fall.  And they kept coming down for the next 12 hours.  After 5 hours of the heavy wet snow, we lost power.  Cell service lasted for another hour, but then the tower went out as well.  Luckily we have the wood stoves for heat and the water stayed on during the entire outage.

Midway through the wintery blast, we went out to do maintenance on the property.  Shaking the snow off of the bushes and trees, checking the outbuildings for snow-load, and running away from the larger trees when we heard the *crack* of a limb breaking and crashing to the ground.

I have to say we were very lucky.  The large limbs from our 150 year old pine trees did not fall on the house.  The black locust limbs that plummeted from hundreds of feet in the air slicing through anything they encountered in their path to the ground only hit gardens - not us!  One of our rescued apple trees was pruned by Mother Nature and seems so sad at half of its' height, but its' roots are snug in the earth.  We were lucky.

Once the snow stopped on Sunday and the roads were clear of emergency vehicles, we shoveled the driveway (the tractor is still set up for mowing - not plowing) and ventured out.  As is usual in the country, we stopped  to move downed trees from the road (sans power lines!).  Our little town was out of gas, so we headed north where we found gas and hot food.  After filling the truck and warming up, we headed back home to our bouncy puppy and another night of monitoring the water lines.  

Our power came back up on Monday, the snow is almost all gone now, but the damage to the gardens is bad.  It could have been worse, though.  Like I said - we were lucky.