Just five minutes ago I took this photo out the window of my study, which faces due west. If you can see beyond the wild cat mobile (from my sister, por supuesto, of course), you can see just how gorgeous it is outside. This notion of Vermont being buried in snow in December is questionable.
Of my 13 Advents and Christmases here, I think all of three or four have actually had snow on the ground. Maybe once, just once, it snowed. That was the Christmas Eve day when a parishioner died about 7.15 in the morning. There were gentle snowflakes coming down as I drove over to the house. Her family wanted her body to go out into the snow, not all zipped up in the black bag but with the bag open, her face up to the sky. I remember walking out to the van with the funeral home guy, alongside D, with the snowflakes gently falling on her face. Yes, it snowed that year.
Most of the time we have had freezing rain or plain old rain. My second year here, the church school put out lucenaria (votives on sand inside little brown paper sandwich bags) and half an hour before the service, the heavens opened. What a soggy mess! It naturally got thrown into the tower room, an unheated stairwell that leads to the upstairs closed-off balcony, a place where junk gets tossed, along with the snow shovel, light bulbs, toilet paper and portable sign we put out to announce things. It was months before I got up the gumption to clean out the rotted paper bags, put the sand back into the bucket of sand (essential for the steps), and pitch the candles.
It is way too early to predict what it will do next week. I am figuring we'll have freezing rain just to drive attendance even further down. (I always want to put in the parochial report that it sleeted on Christmas or snowed on Easter).
That leads me to my next point. More times than not, it will snow on Easter than on Christmas. There was one Easter Vigil at which we were outside on the church porch with the wind whipping around us, threatening to blow my cope into the first fire of Easter, which took a fair amount of time to get lit. The congregation simply held its breath, waiting for a larger conflagration than usual.
The weather, it's New England, what do you expect?
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The white house across the street once belonged to Miss C, a stately and impressive (i.e., somewhat scary) woman who was once upon a time the local university's president's administrator. She and her sister lived there until first, her sister died, and then she died. I bought the clawfoot bathtub from Miss C after her sister died and she was redoing the apartment, got four people to carry it across the street (wish someone had had a camera), which is a story unto itself because they took off before I was ready and rammed the drainpipe into the back of my leg, nearly severing my achilles tendon. When Miss C died, I think the house went to her great-niece. The great-niece rents the house out to students from the local university and, as you can imagine, it has become an exercise in patience. The students like to park so that they block my driveway or, better, overnight in the church driveway, blocking the nursery school parents or Sunday morning church goers. Since there is no overnight parking in the streets from 15 November — 15 April, I have been waiting for the overflow to take over. The kids have eight SUVs and cars that they are trying to stuff into the dooryard, an impossibility. One of the SUVs bit the dust in a bad car accident this fall, but they still have a ton of cars. Maybe my grumpy letter in October (when they blocked my driveway) is working.
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