let it snow, let it snow , let it snow

Here’s to New England weather and all it’s unpredictable  extra snowy bone chillingly fr-fr-frigid glory.

You can puch me if you wanna, but snow is my bestest friend these last few weeks.   SNOW+ Cheryl =BFF     

 Why ? you ask….why when you have spent morning commutes sitting on the highway for hours watching idiot drivers bend fenders and slip slide all over causing numerous traffic delays?

  Why  …when your days are spent walking around aimlessly with heavy shovelfulls of wet snow trying to find a new GD place to stack it up.

 Why…. when the children never ever go to school where they rightfully belong bugging the bejeezus out of paid professionals instead of whinning to you about how bored they are.

 Why…when just today you drove through a pothole the size of Manhattan that jarred your jaw in a way that is still making you wince.

 Why?…Why? Why? am I happy about the snow?.

Because it is winter , and winter is cold . So very cold lately that not one inch of the 50 or so we have recently aquired has even thought of melting…and therein lies my the root of my happiness. My garden is snuggled under the loveliest of winter blankets with no threat of someone stealing the covers so to speak and leaving it exposed to horrible wind chills and the notorious freeze thaw cycles that heave so many of my babies out of the ground and just plain kill others.

In Alaska they call a winter with no ( or very little)  snow a blue screamer. We have had them here ,although the only screamer was me when I saw the damage that January did to May.  The last one was 9  or so years ago and going out in the gardens that spring I  spent  day upon day slowly  realizing how many plants were just  not coming back. All of my fruit trees had a huge percentage of dead branches that needed  to be pruned out, some were not even worth trying to save. I lost anything marginally hardy, which meant that almost every plant in the rock garden was gone as most of them were borderline zone 5 anyway. I can look back at photos taken before that winter nd actually feel a little weepy about the mass die-off.  No part of the garden was left unscathed and  I even lost extremely hardy perennials and 2 ‘New dawn” climbing roses that are super-de-duper hardy.

That terrible no good very bad January ,temperatures were frigid, often below 0, often with numbing winds accompanying them, and there was no snow.

 Snow to a gardener  is  mostly just a great insulator(to  heck with all the slippery qualities you skiers apprecaite)  and here in Jefferson it means that we can plant like we live in zone 5, even though I will insist we are and will always be zone 4. The snow makes all the difference, take it away and we are screamin’blue.