What a gorgeous winter. I’m not trying to convince myself, or you, that winter is always wonderful. I’ve had some hard days this winter, for sure, and of course it makes farm work challenging. However, I’ve found a lot of joy in the depth, intensity, and familiarity of this winter. There is a security to knowing that when the seasons make their slow handoff from one to the other, once the new season is upon us it will settle in, make itself at home, and stay a while. I love the solidity of knowing that there is up to 12 inches or more of ice on some lakes (this can be so variable though-always check it yourself!) and that the iced over lakes will take weeks to melt. I love that there are feet of snow on the ground. I will love it slightly less as its melting and melding with mud, but that’s the trade off that comes with a proper winter.

I grew up in Rochhester, NY, with lake effect snow storms on the regular and slate gray skies for months, and I loved it. But, this winter still does feel like a real throwback winter, reminiscent of the winters of my childhood in New York, but with more blue skies-I do maintain that Maine’s winter has far and away so many more blue sky days than New York.

I certainly hope we’ll have more winters like this, but I keep telling my kids this could be the most wintery winter of their lives.

For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter

that only by wintering through it will the heart survive

Rainer Maria Rilke: The Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

Warmly, from all of us here at the Milkhouse,

Cait