Raising the blind on the window at the top of the stairs this morning revealed a world in soft focus. Snow continues to cover the ground, as it has most of the winter, and lies on every horizontal surface from rooftops and tree limbs to the ghosts of last summer’s flowers. More snow had fallen overnight, and more still fell in flakes so fine enough they looked like fog.
Not much of this winter’s snow has been packing snow. We haven’t seen snow people or other snow creations for weeks. What we do see a lot of is footprints. This snow is great for footprints, and it’s easy to get caught up in the stories they suggest. My sweetheart was so intent on tracks he was following yesterday that he nearly collided with another dogwalker doing the same.
The dog and I followed tracks today that were quite toed out and on the small side. Were they signs of a child trying to walk like a penguin? Of some adult whose feet just happen to toe out? Whoever left them didn’t take any detours to check out points of interest, as children are wont to do. But the stride length was short. A businesslike older child or small adult?
If anyone follows our tracks, they will notice that Rascal favors scenic turnoffs, or the olfactory equivalents thereof. So much of what interests him needs a good sniff. My tracks document a distinct tendency toward 360s. This fanciful behavior is brought to you courtesy of Outdoor Research, the company who makes my mittens.
These mittens were the warmest REI carried, when last I needed mittens. They’re great at keeping hands warm. They are, however, oddly shaped. OR seeks to outfit a population of beings with extremely long fingers. Fingers inches longer than humans’ or at least inches longer than this human’s.
When the dog takes scenic detours in the summer, I pass his leash from one hand to the other to accommodate him. Doing this in my toasty OR mittens is such a big deal as I work with the empty expanses of overlong gloves that it’s easier just to turn my body completely around and leave the leash in the same mitten, wound around the same hollow finger compartments.
It has become a better and better idea to be looking at tracks in the snow as you walk into or out of the west entrance to Sugarbush Woods. Keep you head down, and you may not get clipped by a low-hanging branch. A whole row of redbud trees graces that entrance, a vision in the spring and well nigh a menace now. The tree in question leans a bit, but the real problem is the depth of the snow on the path. Every snowfall raises the path a little closer to the tree’s lowest branch. It’s becoming a hat grabber.
Our friend Cindy brought us a flower this week, golden yellow, in full bloom, and almost the size of a peony. The flower is attached to the top of a ballpoint. Cindy and I had recently discussed the tendency of pens at our house to migrate. No matter how often I round them up and return them to their kitchen corral, they wander off again forthwith, frequently ending up on top of my honey’s dresser. Cindy hopes that the pen of the golden flower will be a homebody. So far, it is.
On the subject of staying home, there’s something I find puzzling about the idea of groundhogs predicting the weather by coming out of their burrows in February. In truth, I find the whole concept puzzling. Groundhogs hibernate. They’re good at it. It’s cozy down there in their burrows, and hibernating doesn’t take much energy.
The only good reason for coming out of hibernation is spring, when there’s getting to be food to eat and other groundhogs to be social with. And how do groundhogs know when it’s spring? The warmth of it wakes them up. No self-respecting groundhog is going to venture out in the sort of deep freeze the country is experiencing now to see if it’s spring yet. A temperature of nine degrees above zero does not portend an early spring.
Do they put space heaters in his burrow and fake him out? Punxutawney Phil, the most put-upon woodchuck in America. The weather woodchuck that lives near here was decanted from a crate to a fake hollow log earlier this week and offered the chance to come out. She came partway out, saw the falling snow, and went back home to hibernate some more. Sounds doable, doesn’t it?
6 February 2026