The Minnesota Farm Woman

The snow came a little early this year. It wasn’t the coming early part that bothered me so much, it was the staying. We often have an early snow, but it usually melts, giving me plenty of time to finish my end-of-fall chores. This year, I had finished hauling the furniture off one deck and put the flower and vegetable beds to bed by covering them with straw. I hauled some broken branches to the burn pile and folded and stacked all the tomato cages. I cleaned out the coop, piling a lot of fresh straw on the dirt floor for insulation.  I left the front deck alone, the planters filled with flowers and the barbecue grill ready to go, hoping for a few more days of fall. Besides, I was tired. When that first snow fell, I knew it would last only a day or two, so didn’t worry about it. Boy, was I wrong. On top of the snow, it rained. The seat cushions became crunchy and froze to the chairs. The geraniums were still green and incased in ice.  The citronella candle had to be chipped of the table.  Yesterday, as HE and I hauled the things through the snow to the shed, I came to the realization that if the snow stays until the end of April, as it often does, we will be having one of those six-months-of-winter years. Yes, I know I live in Minnesota. No, I’m not whining, at least not too much. Yes, I know that it is usually five and a half months anyway,  but some of us who are more compulsive tend to keep track. When I got to contemplating long winters, I thought about a long-ago Memorial Day storm of my childhood, when we were snowbound at our cabin, located at the bottom of a fairly steep hill. Back then, it was an exciting adventure, but these days I can’t even think about it because something like that might make it  a SEVEN month winter, and that is just plain wrong.