Well, so much for my prediction that last week's below-zero weather would be the last of its kind for this winter. Even last night we had -11F and today didn't get out of the low 20s - again. And we're heading into unusually mild, rainy, freezing rain stuff - again. Now I'm wondering if we'll ever find escape this pattern of violent swings in either direction of "normal." As I listened to the weather forecast tonight and read all the winter storm warning alerts that streamed across our television screen, I was thinking that a foot of snow here shouldn't be too much of a bother - our road crews know how to handle it - but when the weather does turn around, there will be some pretty impressive streams of water coming off of these old hillsides. We have quite a lot of snow on the ground now, plus some ice layers, and it's all going to turn to water eventually. Watch out below!
    I have been working on a new chapter of the West Danville history book, pulling together information about various types of accidents that happened here over the years. A lot of them were when horses bolted and sleighs, buggies or wagons tipped over and spilled the passengers into snowbanks or onto the ground. Usually nobody got seriously hurt, but the rigs were often badly damaged. In the newspaper reports it rarely mentions how the horses came out of these accidents. Sometimes they must have been pretty well roughed up and certainly frightened. I expect there was a lot of yelling and possibly cursing going on as people picked themselves up and took off after the runaway horse and carriage.
     Those accidents increased considerably when motorized vehicles came on the scene. Cars and motorcycles frequently spooked horses, and with good reason. The poor animals had never had to share the road with anything that noisy and smelly before. 
     Sometimes accidents were caused by simply going around a corner too fast. Just like drivers today who misjudge their speed when they make a turn and find themselves rolled over in a ditch.
     Then there were the work-site injuries, fingers loped off in the saw mills or mashed in the stone sheds. Losing a finger wasn't any big deal - it seems that probably 50% of the men in town in the 1800s and early 1900s had fewer than the normal number of digits. The railroad workers had their troubles, too, hopping off of trains or sidecars before they came to a stop and getting caught under the wheels. Human error in most cases, but isn't that often the case!
     One farmer pierced his own hand with a pitchfork. I can't quite imagine how he managed to do that, but I bet it hurt. I once drove the tine of a pitchfork into my shin when I was leveling corn silage as it was being blown in. I was foolishly pulling the silage towards me with the fork and lost my balance in the soft silage.  It hurt like the dickens, and I was afraid I might pass out, but I knew if I did I'd be buried by the stream of silage comin in. I pulled the tine out of my leg and climbed up a ladder several feet to get out of the silo into the stable. I didn't pass out, but came close. I remember my grandmother poured carbolic acid on the puncture wound and tied a piece of salt pork over it. When I got home that night, my mother was horrified at the treatment and promptly disposed of the salt pork poultice in favor of a good scrubbing with soap and water, some peroxide and a clean bandage. I survived, but I was really sore and lame for several days. The tine had apparently glanced off my shin bone and done some damage that took a while to heal.
     I've really enjoyed putting this most recent chapter together. I've come to "know" the Badgers, Bricketts, Hunts, Cooks and so many other families, they seem like neighbors.
     I had a short note from Tom Dente today about JPA business. Tom always mentions the weather and he said they have had almost no snow at all in Connecticut this year. That is a good thing, I would guess. He also said Camilla is still getting chemo but has seemed "more like her old self" recently. Chemo is so hard on one's body, not to mention the stress that goes with everything associated with it, I was glad to hear Camilla is managing ok. I know lots of people have been anxious to hear how she's doing - so I decided to share this bit of good news here. Our thoughts and prayers are with Camilla and Tom every day.

     This is how our deck looked this morning - it was just about zero when I took this and the sun was trying to shine, but there were clouds near the horizon that filtered it a bit. The snow pack is down considerably from what it was before the rainy weather, but still we have some impressive snowbanks in places. I looked out around supper time tonight and we had about three inches of new snow - so tomorrow I'll have plenty of snow to measure and clear away to make my CoCoRaHS report. 
     As I'm typing this, I'm listening to the scanner - there have been several calls for wreckers to haul cars and trucks back onto the highways. This afternoon I heard a car went through the ice into a pond somewhere off of Route 5, I think south of St. Johnsbury, but I didn't get all the information. Nobody was hurt, but the car was in the water. The take-away from this: drive carefully and keep your vehicles on the road and off the ice.