We got our sunshine back today. It's been an absolutely gorgeous day, bright sunshine, but bitterly cold with a strong wind right out of the Arctic. I was outside only a short time, and it was really pretty nice if you could stay out of the wind, but where the wind hit, it was frigid.

At lunch I pointed out to Fred the bank of clouds covering the White Mountains. He studied them for a moment and announced we were seeing the mountains, not clouds, but I stuck to my story saying we couldn't see that much of the mountains from where we were sitting at the table. An hour or so later, I got out the camera and took this picture - and then I had to admit I was wrong. There were the mountains, glistening pink in the afternoon sun, not a cloud in the sky, and they were perfectly visible from the table. I maintain it COULD have been clouds, though . . .

You can see how nice and bright it was this afternoon on the pond in the next picture. I was chatting with a neighbor on the phone this afternoon and she was commenting on how cold and windy it always is in West Danville. The wind has been sweeping down the valley and across the pond straight onto Hastings porch for as long as I can remember. Packs the snow in there, too, and it's about the coldest place around most of the winter.

I haven't been up on Cabot Plain since this last storm, but I expect there is some bare ground up there where the snow has been whipped off to land in West Danville. Or maybe St. Johnsbury. In this storm, I think St. Johnsbury got more snow than we did - probably a combination of what fell out of the sky and what blew down from Cabot Plain and West Danville.

I reported another four inches of snow to CoCoRaHS this morning, making a total of about 8 inches from this storm - but actually it was just a guess. I measured on my snow board - one side had about an inch and the other had an 8-inch drift across. The snow was packed against the door onto our deck so I could barely get it open enough to get outside.

I was reminded of when I was a kid living on Cabot Plain and there were many winters when we gave up shoveling to get out of the house and simply tunneled through the big drift that always formed at the front of the house. The wind blew so hard the whole house would shudder in the gusts. Our bedrooms were always very cold because we had a trap door over the stairs to keep the heat from getting up to the second floor. We didn't have electric blankets, but I always had a hot water bottle at my feet - still do sometimes. It's like hot chocolate or oatmeal gruel - just what you need when you're chilled to the bone or just need some comforting.

I dug up some old snapshots of the snow at our house and put together a short slide show. It's hard to date them, but I think they were taken at different times during the late 1930's or 1940's. The Scottie dog was "Heather," and I think we had her about that time. In a couple of the pictures you'll notice there's a ladder. That was for getting up on the roof when there was a chimney fire. I'm not sure what my dad did, but I expect he had a heavy piece of metal he'd put on the chimney to cut off the air supply to kill the fire. We had chimney fires on a regular basis, at least once or twice each winter. I was nearly as frightened of them as I was of the summer electrical storms. Here are the snow pictures: Old photos of Cabot Plain snow

The farm, school, and the house where I grew up are still there, but the big barn burned in 1969 and there now is a new one with two big silos (the Sousa farm) where the cell tower is installed but not operating yet. The farm beyond the school burned in 1953 and there is a new house there now; the school closed in 1948 and became a seasonal home. The house where I grew up was sold in 1963 when my parents built the house Fred and I live in and moved off the Plain out of the wind. Their old house was recently completely renovated by Wendy Jones Leinoff, who, with her husband, owns a great deal of the land that used to be part of the 960 acre farm my grandfather owned.

There were large fields for crops - hay, corn, potatoes, barley and oats, and four very large day pastures that the cows were rotated to in order to have a constant supply of good feed. There was also the night pasture, the horse pasture, and the pasture across the road from where we live now where the Randall's house is. We used to take the young stock to that pasture every spring. It bordered the head of the pond and went nearly to the railroad tracks. My grandfather went at least once a week to salt the cattle and check on them to be sure they were all there and ok. There might not be one in sight when he got there, but he'd call, "Come boss, come boss," and they'd come scampering out of the woods, eager to see him. I don't remember there ever being a problem having them that far away from the farm except once they got through the fence down by the brook and we got a call they were on the railroad tracks. That was when there were at least a couple of trains a day going through. It was a chore to get the cows back into the pasture through the swamp. I remember they stepped on a hornet's nest as we were driving them back through swamp and slash. The cows scattered, and we got stung numerous times. There was plenty of mud to sooth the stings, though, and we finally got all the critters back in their own pasture.

It doesn't seem as if we get the severe storms or as much snow as we used to, but someone reminded me a while back it probably just seemed like there was more snow because we were shorter then. Maybe - or maybe it was because winters are harder up on the Plain and back then there wasn't the equipment available to remove or plow snow like we have today. We had to shovel a lot more than we do now, and never went anywhere in the car without a set of chains with us - that was a job I used to dread, putting chains on the car. I remember how they sounded when we would get out onto the hard surface of the highway, especially if they weren't on the tires quite tight enough and would hit the fender with every revolution.

Kids today won't have these kinds of memories, but I suppose they'll have others that will be just as much fun for them to recall. It seems to me I had a lot more fun growing up than most, though, even without TV or even a telephone for most of my youth.