Winter Wonderland
Luxuriating in coziness
One of the big adjustments to life in Maine — after not living in an area with snow since 1985 — is rediscovering winter. The season slips by so much faster now than it did when I was in college — currently, we are at once in the thick of it, but also already starting to assemble our seed catalogs and think about the coming Spring. The days are getting longer now…
This winter has been beautiful. It started with our perfect White Christmas. A thick layer of snow blanketed us for our family time — which included three generations of women, Beau, and a labradoodle, all of us snowed in for several days, and cozy by the wood burning stove. We cooked for days. One feast after the other, punctuated with walks in the forest where the dog romped joyously through the deep untouched snow, circling around us in wider and wider circles, deep into the woods. Hannah kept the wood burning stove going for days, feeding it log after log.
For months now, Beau and I have been clearing the forest of overgrown invasive plants and baby spruce — a wonderful activity in autumn and winter since the bugs have dispersed, and the waist high weeds and ferns have died off —and great for heart health, flexibility/bending and weight lifting/lugging. So I was excited to show off the progress to our guests — even my mother put on her snow suit and with the help of a pair of walking sticks, plowed across the blueberry field and through the woods, on the last day of her stay.
The geography of the space is increasingly palpable as we cut away the toppled trees lying like corpses across our the farm road, clearing pathways branch by branch, dragging fallen limbs off the stone walls, building large piles of branches and small trees, mounded here and there in the forest. We step back and appreciate being able to see the shape of the land as the dense thicket is thinned out.
Thick with snow, the stone walls and rock piles are even more defined. I show Hannah the Great Grandmother Apple Tree, her boughs heavy with snow. The Lookout Rock, the huge Pile of Sticks — with a guest Treefall on top.
Then there’s the Stone Arch, the Great Maple, and the pathway through the apple orchard where more and more sunlight shines through. We plan to create a map like the one we all remember from Winnie the Pooh, showing the 100 Acre Wood.
After our holiday guests left, Beau and I got to work completing a newly liberated room which had previously been used for my business, packing gift boxes. As of October, when I moved Narrative Food into the old 4th grade homeroom of the Stonington Elementary school, near the port bobbing with lobster boats, the room was now ours to occupy. We managed to finish re-wiring, mudding and painting before the holiday guests arrived, but the wood burning stove we had planned still needed installing before we set the room up.
We picked out some tiles, and started with building the hearth (lots of learning curves there — complicated by the sloping floor!), but after lots of trials, youtube videos, and plenty of head scratching, we finally had a platform completed, wheeled the Facebook Marketplace stove onto the hearth, and got to work connecting the stovepipes.
Ta da. We now have a “media room” with its own fireplace, for our eventing TV watching on the big screen (with a projector), and our desks and files etc. Very cozy.
Room by room, wall by wall, tree by tree, we are discovering and working through the restoration of this place, going on almost 2 years now. Every little thing we do, we see huge progress, which is so satisfying.
Since the latest heavy snowfall, we haven’t been able to continue my exercise regime tidying the forest, so I suggested to Beau that instead, we should try out his hi-tech new snowshoes — a purchase he had made last year, but not really used. With four snowshoes needed between us, I remembered the vintage pair hanging in the barn. Beau brought them with him from the PNW — but I’m sure never intended to use them.
He was skeptical at best, but I eventually wore him down, and off we went, each of us with one hi-tech, and one vintage snowshoe on our feet.
With our mismatched snowgear, we mushed through the neighbor’s land to the frozen pond, which we traversed to get to to the ATV road that circles round to the back of our property. Back home, there’s the ongoing woodfire and a mug of hot cocoa to warm us as the temperatures drop below zero.
I would be remiss, on the subject of Winter Wonderland, if I were to neglect the very important topic of our current electric blanket trials. The upstairs of the house is heated through vents in the floor which allow the downstairs heat to rise up, largely from our wood burning stove — but other than that there is no heat source upstairs. I personally like a cool bedroom and fresh air on my face, with my body toasty under the covers, but in the middle of a cold snap, getting into a cold bed and waiting for it to warm up can be quite a chilling experience. I have been known to howl, kicking my legs furiously as if friction will solve the distressing feel of ice-cold sheets.
Thankfully, a solution to this nightly hollering has been implemented: we appropriated the house electric blanket, that we found stored in the sewing room when we moved in. Now we warm up the bed before we get in, climb in with grateful sighs, luxuriate for a bit, and then — after experimenting with various options, we have determined the best path is to turn it off to sleep (and on Sunday mornings, to switch it back on as we start to stir). I remember using an electric blanket when I was a kid, and then the novel European tradition of duvets arrived in the US, becoming the must-have bedding, and the electric blanket went out of fashion.
Beau turned to me the other day, with his guilty smile: “I bought us something.” My thoughts went into various directions (something naughty, something sweet?), until he revealed the mystery: “A king size electric blanket. One that fits our bed.” Indeed, the trials had revealed a problem with our sheet pulling out of place — presumably when I’m greedily tugging on the electric blanket, which barely spreads the width of our mattress. The electric blanket we have is the perfect size for one of our guest beds, so it will not go to waste. Meanwhile, we count the days til our perfected winter bedding setup is finalized.
One last thing. We have a fox. The barn-cam shows him trotting through the snow most nights, and we see his tidy prints crisscrossing back and forth and around the house, down the path to the wintering veggie garden, and around the barn. I call him Fox Trot.
Cozy cozy. Winter on our Isle is just as fun as summer days. : )
Awesome post - it's fun to watch you both make the place yours. Where is the labradoodle?