Snow!

Snow! This is what greeted me when I stepped out of the cabin this morning. This truly counts as an actual dusting of snow, not a pretend dusting like I had yesterday morning. For most of this week the sky has looked like snow, and I’ve seen flurries and flakes almost every day. But since nothing much was coming out of the sky, I’d gotten out of the habit of expecting it to amount to anything.

Then around 4 a.m. I woke up and saw into the forest from my bed. The woods looked light, almost as though the sun was soon coming up. I think it was this false dawn that woke me up. I knew as soon as I looked out that it was snowing. When it snows in the woods at night, the sky turns a pale shade of tin gray that I only see in winter. This is the snow sky, and as the clouds lower, they brighten the surrounding forest even before the first flakes cover the ground.

Later, after I’d gotten up, I could see the snow was heavy enough to coat the decks and this year’s leaves that fell only last week. The dogs even tried to run through the snow with their noses acting like a snow plow. That didn’t quite work. Maybe next time.

Snowmaking at Roundtop will start tonight, which will likely make the season’s opening sometime over Thanksgiving weekend, though it will be several more days before we can yet know a precise date. Winter is arriving, one little step at a time.