More Winter!

I'm not sure what time of day that woodchuck looked for his shadow, but I'm pretty sure he saw it on Sunday and we are definitely in for at least another six weeks of winter! Today proved winter is in full force! We have had a little of everything today - a few glimpses of sunshine, mostly weak and struggling, snow flurries, gusty west wind, and at times blizzard conditions as the snow fell and the wind blew a gale. I watched from my window as clouds of snow blew off trees and swirled off my roof. The chickadees and nuthatches were busy all day at the feeder and kicked out snow that occasionally began to cover their banquet. Even on the protected southeast side of the house there was a lot of snow swirling off the porch roof and collecting in their feeder. I scooped the snow out for them a few times when it got a bit deep, but whenever I opened the window to do that, there was a swirl of cold air and sometimes snowflakes coming in on me. The temperature was in the low teens above zero all day. This evening I see it is 9.5 - going to be a cold night again. I almost forgot to mention that I measured another almost 5 inches of new snow this morning. Every little bit counts!

There is an obituary for Geoffrey Penar in the Caledonian Record today. 

Yesterday I delivered a copy of a book, "Cabot, Vermont, Transcriptions of Memories Past," which the Cabot Oral History Committee recently decided to reprint. It is the unedited transcripts of the  interviews with older Cabot residents done in the 1980s and 90s and which provided the content for  "Cabot, Vermont, A Collection of Memories From the Century Past" published in 1999. Barbara Carpenter, Amanda Legare, and I sifted through those transcripts to pick out what we needed for our chapters and Caleb Pitkin was our editor. We were careful not to include some of the material that might offend anyone, and of course there were similar stories but different perspectives, all of which are in these original transcripts. 

The old tape recordings that the paper transcripts came from were eventually recorded to MP3 format when we realized that nobody had reel-to-reel or cassette players anymore and the originals were deteriorating. Then even the paper transcripts began to yellow and fade. We decided the only way to preserve that valuable information was in book form. I took on that project and a hard-cover volume was published in 2014. We had copies printed for members of the oral history committee and a complimentary copy for the Cabot Historical Society.

We lost Barbara a few years ago and all but one of the people originally interviewed have passed on.  There has been some interest recently in reading some of those interviews.and Amanda, Caleb, and I

decided to have a few more copies printed. There are no photos in this book, just transcriptions of all those conversations between interviewers and Cabot residents, uncut and unedited.

Our librarian, Kathleen Hoyne, was amazed at the size of the book -  almost 800 pages - and she was pleased to add it to the reference/history section at the Cabot library.

Stay warm and safe.