Welcoming (Reluctantly) Winter

The path to the front porch.

We had our first significant snowfall of the season last week. Over Tuesday afternoon and night two inches of snow came down. It was a wet snow, rather sloppy. Not the prettiest sort. On Wednesday morning when I went down to the barn in the slushy snow, the chickens were reluctant to come out. I couldn’t even coax them out with their morning scratch. They don’t like the snow. I had to throw their scratch to them inside the coop. The rain barrel that I get their water from had ice so thick on it that I had to pry up a rock to break it to get them water. Later in the afternoon, I ran an extension cord down to the barn and plugged in the electric heater that sits under their waterer. That’s a big sign of the season for me. That electric cord will lie across the lawn until April. If the rain barrel freezes too deeply, I’ll have to start carrying water down from the house every day. Oh winter! you make life more difficult in so many ways.

The electric cord running to the barn.

The frozen rain barrel down at the barn.

Winter is not a convenient season. So many things become difficult when there’s snow, ice, and freezing temperatures to contend with. The only time it is convenient is when the snow, ice, and freezing temperatures become so severe, we just stay home. I never mind just staying home in the winter.

Last weeks snow.

A sunrise last week.

I always feel the need to tend plants, no matter the season. During the months when the garden is asleep, I rely on my indoor plants to keep me happy. I keep plants in several parts of the house. The main group of them is in the music room where there are big west-facing windows. I have two shelves in those windows and extra plant lights. I keep my orchids there as well as two euphorbias, a peperomia, and an aloe vera. My potted rosemary and night-blooming jasmine also spend the winter there before going back outside when warm weather comes again. I also keep my air plants there.

My houseplants in the music room.

My fascination with air plants started when we took our first trip to Florida in 2019. I saw them growing all over there and fell in love with their strangeness. I sent for some and when they arrived, I fastened them to a branch that I pruned from one of my apple trees. I have two kinds, Tillandsia ionantha and Tillandsia caput-medusae. They are epiphytic bromeliads, in the same family as pineapples, but they don’t grow in soil, they grow up in the branches of trees. I love my air plants. They don’t need much care. I mist them a few times a week and give them a spritz of diluted plant food a couple of times a year.

My air plants.

The other places where my houseplants reside are, the bay window in the living room, the northwest window of my bedroom, and the downstairs bathroom. In the bathroom I have a dwarf schefflera, which lives there permanently, two pelargoniums that are just there for the winter, and a huge philodendron that has taken over the whole wall above the bathtub. The plants in my bedroom are, a little Peperomia verticillata and four schlumbergeras – one that blooms at Thanksgiving (it’s blooming now), two that bloom around Christmas, and one that never blooms. The plants in the living room bay window are, a night-blooming cactus (Epiphyllum) that is there year round, and an Osmanthus fragrans that just comes indoors for the winter. The epiphyllum blooms every few years with gorgeous huge, fragrant flowers. The osmanthus has never bloomed for me in the twelve years I’ve had it, but if it did, it would have hundreds of tiny white intensely scented flowers. I live in hope every year that this will be the year it finally blooms.

Plants in the front bay window.

Plants in my bedroom window.

Plants in the downstairs bathroom.

Last week I’d planned to begin tackling the books on my winter reading list with Homer’s Odyssey, but I took a little detour instead. I recently came into possession of some Calvin and Hobbes books, several collections of the comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from 1985 to 1995. I have always been a fan of the strip. I like this description of it:

“Calvin, a precocious, mischievous and adventurous six-year-old boy; and Hobbes, his sardonic stuffed tiger. Set in the contemporary suburban United States, the strip depicts Calvin's frequent flights of fancy and friendship with Hobbes. It also examines Calvin's relationships with his long-suffering parents and with his classmates, especially his neighbor Susie Derkins. Hobbes' dual nature is a defining motif for the strip: to Calvin, Hobbes is a living anthropomorphic tiger, while all the other characters see Hobbes as an inanimate stuffed toy.”

My recently acquired Calvin and Hobbes books.

It is pretty sophisticated for a comic strip, the best ones always are. I think I shed a little tear when I read the last strip that appeared on December 31, 1995. The Odyssey has been around for almost 3,000 years. Homer will have to wait a few days more.

The final Calvin and Hobbes strip.

It snowed again on Wednesday night and off and on again on Thursday. All in all, it didn’t amount to much – enough to make things look a little wintry, but not enough to be pretty about it. To the north of us where they get lake effect snow, they got more than four feet in some places! I’m glad we’re too far from the lakes to get that. With the snow, activity at the bird feeders really picked up. There were the usual goldfinches, juncos, chickadees, cardinals, woodpeckers, and nuthatches, but for several mornings we’ve also had a flock of evening grosbeaks. We don’t see them regularly at our feeders and it is a treat when we do. They are lovely birds.

Snow at a friend's house up in Orchard Park, New York.

At our friend's house in Orchard Park.

Evening grosbeaks at the bird feeders.

More evening grosbeaks.

Friday was clear and cold. We never made it above freezing. I spent the day doing some last minute winter prep chores. Once the snow starts to pile up, it becomes difficult for us to go down into the cellar. The exterior door that opens onto the steps that go down to the main cellar door is on the front of the back porch and it swings up. Snow always drifts in front of that door, making it hard to open for most of the winter. We have another way to get down there once that happens. We can lift some of the floorboards inside the porch and go down a ladder to the main door, but that isn’t very convenient. So most of my chores were about accessing the cellar while it was still easy. I realized, belatedly, that I hadn’t taken the garden hose down cellar. I had to thaw its connection to the spigot with boiling water before I could unscrew it and take down. I finally got the dahlia tubers and gladiolus corms packed away. For the last few weeks they’ve been on the back porch with a small heater running to keep them from freezing. Now they are in their tubs, packed with wadded up old newspapers, and safely stored down cellar until next May. Having done that, I turned off the heater that was on the porch. That meant that everything else that was out there that shouldn’t freeze had to come into the house – the pumpkins, squash, potatoes, and garlic that we’ve been waiting to process. While I was doing all of that, Miriam was busy baking the first batch of Christmas cookies – ginger spice cookies, one of my favorites. They went straight into the freezer. There will be a lot of baking, even more than usual, over the next weeks.

The door to the cellar.

The last pumpkins and squash waiting to be processed.

Miriam's ginger spice cookies.

Saturday was another bitter cold day. The high temperature was just 25°. In spite of that, we were out and about and busy all day. In the morning, Stacey and I drove into town to test drive some used cars. Our Toyota is now past repairing and we are looking to replace it. I don’t like cars and I especially don’t like shopping for them, but Stacey is good at checking out the market. She knows what to say and what to ask. I’m glad for that. While we were in town we also went grocery shopping for the things we will need for Thanksgiving this week. I hadn’t been in a grocery store in a long, long time and I was surprised at how expensive some things are. When we got back from that, I spent the rest of the day processing pumpkins. I had one roasting in the oven and one steaming in the Instant Pot all day. I ended up finishing six. There are still more to go and I will work on them this week.

In the afternoon between pumpkins, Hannah and I began putting up outdoor Christmas lights. It was so cold, we had to come in every ten minutes or so to warm up. We should have done it earlier in the month when it was 70°. We succeeded in putting up the lights on the front porch. We still have to do the second story eaves, the back porch, and the driveway fence. I see that midweek we are supposed to warm to 44°, I think we’ll wait until then to finish the job. The cold makes working outdoors difficult.

Phase one of the outdoor Christmas lights done.

Today is another cold, blustery day. When I went out this morning it was 18° with a wind chill of 6°. The chickens refused to come out of their coop and I don’t blame them. Today was stake conference and thanks to technology, we didn’t have to drive all the way up to Palmyra to attend. We watched the session in our own chapel via Zoom. Now we are home. It has warmed up to 22°. Stacey is making oatmeal burgers and home fries for lunch, perfect food for a cold day. I will go out into the cold, reluctantly,  and do the chores after lunch. Then the most appropriate thing I can think of to do is crawl under blankets and take a nap.

This week we will celebrate Thanksgiving. We will have a happy houseful. The Thayns and Daniel and Raven are coming here to celebrate with us. We will miss having the Fosters here. We have our traditional menu planned. The days ahead will be busy with preparations. I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving!