Living up north: a primer

People ask me sometimes why I moved here from Vermont. 

People who ask that don’t realize that when you live in Vermont, everything is a whole thing.

Exiting your driveway, for example. Do you just run a shovel over it, get in your car, and away you go?

Oh no, my friend.

 

Hopefully, the snowplow guy came that morning. In that case, you merely need to get a scoop of ashes from the ashcan in the garage and sprinkle a double trail of ashes from where your two tires will hit the frozen-over driveway aaaallllll the way up to the road, going back 18 times to refill your scoops, slipping on the ice the whole time, walking upwind lest the ash dust blow all over your pants, and being sure you get the sprinkled amount with scientific precision so there’s A) enough ash for traction, but B) not enough to incur parental wrath for wasting precious ash.

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Then you can get in the car, rev the engine, and hit your ash trails with enough momentum to make it up the hill before you start sliding. And heaven help you if you didn’t get your trails perfectly parallel because then only one tire at best will have traction (and you wasted all that good ash on a useless trail, shame on you).

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If the snowplow guy didn’t come yet, well. 

I hope you got up early. 

Because now you have to shovel before starting the ash-sprinkling process. Again with the precision parallel trails. And if the snowplow guy didn’t come, it’s probably because we got an excessive amount of snow, which means the car isn’t going to clear it unless you skim some snow off between the tire tracks as well.  

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School starts at, what, 7:45? So you better get going. 

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Also the sun rises around 11:15 and sets at 2:30 this time of year, so it’ll be pretty dark. And cold. Probably windy, otherwise how would the ashes blow on your pants and in your eyes?

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You need to get to school early enough that you can get to your locker and hang up your coat, scarf, mittens, and hat, and change out of your caked snow boots into whatever shoes you brought to actually wear in school, all before the bell rings. Be sure you store all your extra school books above all that because throughout the day your outerwear will melt and form a muddy puddle at the bottom of your locker.

{When I heard that kids around here don’t use lockers, I was stunned. “But where do they put their coat and boots?”}

Being the youngest child and also a girl, I didn’t get the brunt of all that work until I was old enough to drive myself to school. Before that, I was never trusted enough to sprinkle ashes, only to help shovel the endless tire path up, up, up the dark, interminable hill to the road.

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I therefore, was allowed to sleep in til 6:00 on school days. Not past, mind you, since Dad was up and at ’em, having already prepared himself for work and started a fire in the woodstove, the most important and drawn-out part of which was scraping out yesterday’s ashes. 

No ash mite left behind.

The drawer where the ashes went when they fell through the grate was metal, and the ash shovel was metal, and Dad was thorough. If you’ve never heard every single ash being carefully and methodically scraped out of a metal drawer at 5:45am, but you have seen that part in Lord of the Rings where Frodo is right underneath the Nazgûl when it comes out of Mordor and he falls down clutching his ears in agony because of the unbearable screeching, you’re starting to get an idea. But that sound stopped and the Nazgûl went off to start a war. Imagine it stayed there and kept screeching until every ash was collected and you’d rather go outside and shovel the icy driveway than stay in bed listening to Dad start a fire.

That’s winter morning in Vermont.

Going to bed: also a whole thing. You don’t just get in bed, like a crazy person. If you’re old enough to have your own electric blanket, you crank that puppy up first, before you brush your teeth and put on pjs. But if you’re too young for that privilege, then you boil water, fill your rubber hot-water bottle without scalding yourself, screw the top on tight, and put it way down between the cold sheets while you get ready. That way when you do climb in bed, you won’t gasp and cringe quite as much.

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But at least it’s only cold in the wintertime, you say! That’s only like 9 months out of the year! The rest of the time is carefree butterfly chasing! 

Wrong.

Mom and Dad had next year’s firewood delivered and dumped in several loads all along the side of the house in early summer, the level area in the back of the house being too narrow to fit a dump truck. Then, after it had enough time to dry out a little, and for plenty of snakes to move in and get comfortable, they would call the whole family out to Stack Firewood.

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Maybe this only took an hour over a couple different days. I admit a child’s perception of time is different than an adult’s. So my memory of trudging back and forth with heavy, splintery, occasionally snake-infested, always-covered-with-bugs firewood is that it took approximately the same amount of time it took the Hebrews to build the pyramids.  

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A child too young to be trusted to sprinkle ash is certainly too young to stack firewood correctly, so a competent family member squatted on top of the growing pile of precision-stacked logs while everyone else handed them up a few at a time, transforming a randomly dumped pile next to the house, over the course of 400 years, into an efficiently stacked, compact fortress directly behind the back garage window.

And I don’t care how many times you lift a log and there’s a snake underneath, Winter is Coming. Keep stacking.

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Then, Dad or older brothers would regularly take a bunch of precisely stacked logs and one by one split them with an axe on the chopping block. Now you have manageable-sized firewood, which you bring into the garage, and guess what? Stack it. Precisely.

From the garage, Dad or manly brother regularly hauls in a sackful of wood (unavoidably dropping a faint trail of wood chips and dirt and probably bugs all through the breezeway, living room, and family room) and stacks it in the cubby next to the woodstove.

Repeat ad nauseum throughout 9-11 months of winter.

Forgive me when I fail to see the romance in a real wood-burning fireplace.

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Even recreation is a whole thing. Sledding was no casual pastime at our house, but serious business. It was year-round work for my dedicated brothers, who spent the summer mowing the (named) sled trails and banking up the turns with logs.

Once the snow starts falling, you don’t get out the sleds, oh no. You first get out the snowshoes and you walk the trails, packing them down to acceptable riding condition. Then, when your brothers say so, you’re allowed to sled. But you better steer right, because if you go off the trail you’ve ruined everything we’ve ever worked for. Each sled trail had its own dedicated walk-up trail as well. I about had a heart attack the first time I went sledding at a friend’s house and then just went up and down willy-nilly, stepping directly on the trail on the way back up.

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Coming in from outside is definitely a whole thing. You take off your boots at the outer door, of course, and walk quickly to the family room before you drip. You get an old towel and spread it on the floor in front of the woodstove. You take a few kitchen chairs and put them on the towel, backs to the stove. You remove your coat and snow pants and scarf and hang them on the chairs to drip on the towel. 

Boots and socks go on the boot tray. You get the family yardstick, shove it under the stack of board games in the cubby above the firewood, and hang on the other end of it the special crocheted coat hanger with dangling clothespins. You clip up your mittens, wrist warmers and hat. You pick off any stray clumps of snow stuck to you and throw them on the woodstove to watch them sizzle. 

And now you have completed Coming Inside in Vermont.

And you think going outside is simple? Obviously not. Once Dad had cleaned out and started the woodstove (see: ashes, above), he would go to the unheated breezeway where we kept our outerwear and retrieve everyone’s coat for the day. These he would drape over the couch in the family room, insides up, so they could warm up near the woodstove to a tolerable temperature before we had to don them. Mom’s coat was always in the prime spot, over the arm of the couch right next to the woodstove, with all the kids’s coats covering the back of the couch leading farther away from the heat source.

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And that, my friends, is how you stay married for 50 years.

Also how you toughen up your kids. 

This is how you show marital love in Vermont: you put your wife’s coat the closest to the fire. The kids can have the leftover spots, but you prioritize your spouse. The kids will survive. They will shiver for the rest of their life, but they will also rest secure in knowing their parents are committed to each other.

And that is the story of why I moved south.