We hope everyone is enjoying the long holiday weekend.  We found we were a bit tuckered after the frenzy if holiday gatherings, cooking, overeating (slightly) and keeping up with things in general.  We certainly enjoyed having mild weather, but we didn't go to the extremes some folks here in the north country did.  In today's Caledonian Record there are reports of some folks on Shadow Lake in Concord water skiing, and in St. Johnsbury, some guy was out mowing his lawn.  It's good that people took advantage of the warm weather because tonight things are beginning to change.  I just took pictures of the evening sky - unusual puffy clouds.  The top picture is the southwestern sky, and the bottom is looking southeast towards the pond from our house.  We've had clear sky and sunshine today, but this evening the clouds are rolling in and the temperature is dropping into the 30s and snow is predicted.  There was a white coating of frost on everything this morning - like in the early fall. I paid attention to the forecast - up to 5 inches of snow over tonight and tomorrow - and finally put out my snow measuring pole in the back yard.  I was beginning to think I might not need it this year!

Speaking of snow, here's a nice picture of a snow roller in Cabot.  I don't know the year, but it could have been as late as the 1930s.  I was also interested in the house.  There are plants in the bay windows, but it looks as if the upstairs has been unused for some time - notice the  missing and broken panes of glass and shuttered dormer.  Closing the upstairs off after children were grown and out of the house was a way of saving heat and labor.

Once the roads were rolled after a storm, folks went off in their one-horse open sleighs, over the meadows and through the woods . . . 

However, not everyone had a smart-stepping horse and sleek little sleigh.  More than one family used a steer, or sometimes the family cow, to pull their wagons.  I think it was the Perkins kids over in South Cabot that would ride one of their cows to school, then turn her around and she'd go back to the barn.  At the end of the day, the children's father would sometimes pick them up with the cow pulling a wagon or sled.  Probably most often they simply trudged home as soon as school let out because they all had chores to do.  The one-room schools in Cabot were thoughtfully placed so that no child would have to walk more than two miles to school.  I don't think they had snow days when schools closed.   

However, in the very early 1800s, school didn't keep during the harshest winter months or sometimes during mud season, but was kept during the summer months. Back then it was difficult to even find someone qualified to teach school, so some communities had no schools for their children for long periods of time.  Anyone with even a little bit of education might be called upon to teach, even young women of 15 or 16, or there might be an itinerant male teacher who would stay for a period of a few weeks, boarding with one of the families in the community and teaching pupils gathered at someone's house, and then he would move on to some other town.  Eventually, of course, education got more organized and regulated.