Category Archives: Winter

The worst

Some time before four in the morning, I was awakened by the quiet. The forecast had been for sleet and rain; did they get it wrong? was it quiet because it was snowing? or was it quiet because the storm was going to miss us? I looked out the window: the street was still dry. I checked the National Weather Service Web site: rain and snow in Connecticut, headed our way. I went back to sleep, and within an hour awakened again to hear something — rain, sleet, wind-driven snow — hitting the windows.

By the time I got up, sometime after seven, the street outside our apartment was covered with several inches of windblown snow. By the time I started walking up to the church, the snow had turned to sleet, and then to freezing rain. I shoveled off one side of the front walk, and got a number of calls on my cell phone: “The town plows haven’t even reached out house yet, I won’t be in”; “Just checking to see if someone was at church”; “I’m on my way, I’ll be a little late.”

Some twenty people showed up for the worship service, less than half our usual fifty-to-sixty people. Many of them lived within walking distance, including the two newcomers, but one person made it all the way from Westport, a good half hour drive. After the worship service, he told me, “I started out following the plow, usually that’s the best thing to do in a storm. But it was raining by then, and the plow was pushing water — the water was deeper behind the plow than in front — so I wound up having to pass the plow.” It was pouring rain during the worship service.

Our plowing service still hadn’t showed up by one o’clock as we were leaving the church. Mark, who happened to be driving his truck with the plow on it, volunteered to plow the church parking lot. His plow scooped up water and slush and snow drenched in water, and at the end of each pass when the plow hit the snowbank, there was a huge splash as muddy water went ten or twelve feet into the air. I finished shoveling the sidewalk and stairs; it got up to almost fifty degrees this afternoon, but it’s supposed to dip well below freezing tonight, and any snow left on the sidewalks tonight will turn into a block of ice that will last until spring.

I ate lunch, tired and sore from shoveling that wet, heavy snow. By the time I went back up to the church for the youth group meeting, the rain had stopped. And when we left after the youth group meeting, the temperature was just about at freezing: black ice forming everywhere.

This is just about the worst weather New England can dish out. In the past twenty-four hours we have seen snow, freezing fog, sleet, freezing rain, rain, mist, fog, and what the Weather Service called “unknown precipitation.” The ground is covered with heavy wet snow, which has been made even heavier by all the rain that fell on top of the snow. Now everything is going to freeze solid, and with the short days and long nights nothing is going to thaw out for a very long time. The heavy snow saps your physical strength; the darkness and dreariness saps your emotional strength; and you long for summer, or a trip to someplace warm.

I was at work most of the day, only getting outside during lunch hour. I didn’t even manage my usual walk. When I finally left the office at 6:30, I walked out to my car to find big snowflakes dotting its roof. At first, I thought someone had thrown something on my car. I couldn’t believe it was snow — the sun was out at lunch time, how could it have snowed? — and I had to touch one of the flakes, to have one of the huge flakes melt under my fingertip and feel the wetness of it, before I believed that it had snowed. I wanted to have seen the snow flurry, big wet flakes drifting lazily down from dark clouds, but I had been inside. I don’t think I’m meant to be inside most of the day. Our ancestors evolved outdoors, and evolution has not designed us to spend all day inside, staring at computer screens, talking on phones, attending meetings. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel any need to be outdoors all the time — I worked as a carpenter for five years, and I worked out in the yard at a lumber yard for a year and a half, and there are many days when it is much better to be indoors. But there has to be a middle ground, some way to get more than one short hour a day outdoors.

February

February is my least favorite month. Even when we’ve had a relatively easy winter, as we have this year, by February I’ve had enough — had enough cold, had enough darkness, had enough snow and freezing rain and miserable weather.

Years ago, I remember talking with housemates about which months were our favorites. Joel liked one of the summer months, I forget which one. I said I liked November best, because the mosquitoes are gone and as long as the snow held off it’s the best month for hiking. Sue said her favorite month was February.

“February?” said Joel and I incredulously. February was one of the worst months of the year, said Joel. The only good thing about February, I said, was that it only lasted twenty-eight days. But Sue said she liked February because by February you can really tell that the days are getting longer, and she also loved those clear blue days you sometimes get.

Joel and I realized that Sue’s birthday was in February — no wonder it was her favorite month. Then Sue pointed out that Joel’s favorite month happened to be the month in which he was born, and of course I was born in November. So we decided that our favorite months were our favorites simply because those were the months in which we were born.

Ever since Sue told us that this is her favorite month, at least I’ve been able to appreciate that by February you can really tell that the days are growing rapidly longer — and when we do get a clear day in February, I can look up and appreciate the deep blue of the sky.

And I’m cranky and irritable and ready for spring, and I’m still glad February only lasts twenty-eight days.

Housemate memories

A cold dark snowy evening, trapped at home alone. Time dragging. Bored, my mind started drifting and for some reason I started thinking about housemates. My thoughts went something like this: Carol and I met when we were housemates. We met Ms. M. when she moved in as a new housemate. Too bad our current apartment does not permit sublets…. And then some of the more extraordinary memories of housemates started bubbling up, like the Dead Mouse Incident….

One morning, I came downstairs to eat breakfast, half-asleep as usual. J— greeted me by saying, “Did you do that?” Did I do what? “Put the mouse in the dog’s water dish.” I hadn’t done it, and we both went over to the dog’s water dish to look at the poor dead mouse floating there. We both giggled silently.

You have to understand, we had not been getting along with N——, the dog’s owner, in large part because she just wasn’t caring for the dog. Being a black Lab, the dog liked to roll in smelly things, and when we complained about the smell N—– would bathe the dog in the tub, leaving dog hair and other gunk plastered over tub and tiles; so J— and I had to wash the dog ourselves under the outdoor shower. The dog had worms and would leave long streaks of excrement on the carpet; N—– would clean the carpet but wouldn’t take the dog to the vet to get de-wormed. Worst of all, N—– would go for days at a time without walking the dog, which made the poor animal more and more neurotic and less and less likable.

To return to the story: N—– came bounding down the stairs, accompanied by the dog, both of them as cheerful as usual. We did not warn her what was in the dog’s water dish. N—– walked over to put food in the other dog dish and screamed when she saw the mouse. “Did you do that?” she screamed at us. We both denied having drowned the mouse.

Our relationships had deteriorated to the point where I doubt she believed us. And though I’m not proud of it, I went off to work in an unusually good mood that morning. N—– moved out a few months later, and come to think of it that’s when Carol moved in. Ten years later, Carol called me in to see something on television, a story about an animal psychologist, and sure enough there was N—– on television with a new dog, another black Lab, going to visit the animal psychologist. I’ve now forgotten what sort of psychological problem the dog suffered from.

Memories of other housemates come flooding back. There was W—, the woman who refused to turn on the radiators in her room because she didn’t like the hissing sound, and who lit dozens of candles in an effort to keep warm (unfortunately, we had to kick her out because we were afraid she was going to start a fire). And S—, who was in the process of discovering she was gay while she lived with us. And D—, who was dealing (gracefully) with the memories of being raped by her father when she was pubescent. And L—, who had the same name as a prominent Boston gangster, and claimed that he once got a phone call from someone saying, “Is this L—? We took care of it.” And the time when J—‘s father died. And R— of the invisible dirt, and J— and E— the M.I.T. students, and others.

It’s easy to tell the stories of the bizarre and notable events, but it’s harder to explain how enjoyable it has been to have housemates, to just sit around the dinner table or on the front porch talking about everything under the sun. People from whom you can borrow music, people with whom you can throw parties, people who can teach you how to bake bread or cook macrobiotic food. Some of those housemates became good friends, like Ms. M., who became our housemate again for one delightful year when we lived in Oakland.

Someday, Carol will get around to making her idea for an eco-village into reality, and then we’ll have housemates once again….

Ice

The ice on the harbor probably reached its greatest extent sometime yesterday. By the time I went out for a walk, the ice reached from the Maritime Terminal on the New Bedford side of the harbor to Fish Island; of course there was no ice over the deep channel between Fish Island and Pope’s Island; but from Pope’s Island the ice extended straight north to the point that lies just below the highway, and south to Crow Island to the boatyards and docks on the Fairhaven side. Gulls by the hundreds perched on the ice between Pope’s and Crow Islands, all facing into the sun.

I walked down to the hurricane barrier. An ice shelf extended from the hurricane barrier up to Fairhaven Shipyard, and bits of rotten sea ice floated on the ocean side. But by then the temperatures had climbed into the mid-thirties, and when I got back up to Pope’s Island, the ice no longer extended to Crow Island; scaup and Bufflehead swam where just an hour earlier the gulls had been perching on ice.

Even though today was ten or fifteen degrees colder than yesterday, even though the clouds moved in and blocked the sun, even though a cold raw breeze backed around from the north to the east, the ice had receded even farther when I went out walking this afternoon. I stopped on the swing span bridge to look at the extent of the ice down the Fairhaven side of the harbor. What caught my eye, though, was not the ice but a pair of Long-tailed Ducks swimming just below the bridge. I was impressed at how long they could remain underwater. I timed them on one dive, and they were underwater for fifty-five seconds. My sense was they could remain underwater even longer than that, but it was too cold and raw to stand there and time them again — cold and raw, as if snow or cold rain was moving in — so I walked on.

A rumor of spring

The two red pennants — signifying a gale warning — over the harbormaster’s office snapped in the winter wind sweeping down out of the northwest. Walking across to Fairhaven, I noticed that the frigid weather of the past few weeks has finally caused a thin skin of ice to grow across a good part of the shallow water between New Bedford and Fish Island. The waves kicked up by the wind reflected off the edge of the ice, but the ice was so thin that the waves also passed through it in a diminished state; the ice was so thin that it was still flexible. When I got closer I could see that the ice had faint lines running through it, so that it almost had the texture of skin. Of course there was no ice between Fish Island and Pope’s Island’ that’s where the thirty-foot deep channel for shipping runs. But ice stretched all the way from Pope’s Island to Fairhaven, and from Fairhaven to Crow’s Island, and thin sheets of ice covered much of the water all along the Fairhaven side of the harbor.

In spite of all the ice, I read today that a thousand Red-Winged Blackbirds arrived in Dover last weekend, just twenty miles north of here: the first rumor of spring.

Adventures in local food

When we moved to New Bedford, we got introduced to a new variety of turnip by the farmers at our local farmers’ market — the Wesport Macomber Turnip, a very mild white-fleshed turnip that I’ve never seen for sale anywhere else. Last time I was at one of our local supermarkets, I saw they had some for sale, erroneously labeled “Cape White Turnips.” I bought two and tonight we ate one.

Carol had figured out that the Wesport Macomber tastes as good raw as it does cooked. I quartered one of the large turnips, and cut thin slices off for us to eat raw. Eaten raw, they’re sweet and succulent, with a faint peppery taste not unlike the peppery taste of turnip greens — it’s a nice combination of flavors. Better still, the flesh is crisp and firm and juicy, a little harder than a really crisp apple. It’s far enough into the winter I really craved that kind of crisp, juicy sweetness; and somehow it felt far more satisfying than the fruit that gets shipped to supermarkets from the southern hemisphere at this time of year.

We cooked the rest — boiled for about five minutes until it was firm but tender, and served drained and with a pat of butter on top. Cooked, the flavor is richer, more like rutabagas or purple-top turnips than radishes, but much lighter-tasting than any other turnip I’ve ever had.

According the Web site of Less Market in Westport, Adin and Elihu Macomber developed the Westport Macomber in the 1870’s by crossbreeding radishes and rutabagas, and it seems to have gotten the best of both parents (more history here). Whatever its history and antecedents, it’s a local delicacy that’s perfect for this time of year.

Cold

Carol and I went out for a walk this afternoon. It was pretty cold, and there was a stiff wind — stiff enough that the harbormaster had hoisted the gale warning flags. There was ice forming in the shallow, sheltered parts of the harbor. The bitter cold felt good. I’ve been longing for some serious cold, especially after the too-warm fall we’ve had, and at this time of the year, when you can finally sense that each day is a little longer than the day before, the bitter cold doesn’t seem so dire as it does when the days are at their shortest.