More Photos Below!Gallery
We just got our first quality snowfall of the season here in mid-Michigan. So now we’re hopefully off’n’running. All trails are open, as they say.
We have about 6-8″ and it’s mid-20’s days, teens nights. We made it!
We missed out on the lovely whiteness of last year’s December, but whatever.
Here’s how our front porch looks these days.
But the best thing is that Lucy & Friends are getting out there every day.
What’s even more surprising is that the timing has included a girls outing for the past few *evenings*! That is, Lucy and friends head on out, yet again, at the start of what we call the Blue Hour. Basically, 15 minutes later it’s pitch black, but your eyes adjust out there in the whiteness and you can still kinda see where you’re skiing. So here we have girls who are afraid of the dark who are obliviously out there playing in the dark! Yesterday they took off saying they were on an adventure and that they had pudding with them… OK…
I lean out now and then to listen and hear chatter off in the woods, so all is well.
It’s been so much fun having the girls laying down the tracks on the yard trail this year, for the first time! Once I didn’t get out after a snowfall until a few hours afterward. When I got out I saw the trails already skied in. I knew the girls had gone out but this looked like a lot of skiers had been out. I even went to the far side of the system and still there were tracks galore. I thought that neighbors must’ve been out as well, but, no, no tracks from their yards. The little posse of 9-year-olds had covered the whole place repeatedly!
Maybe not coincidentally, Martha is reading Pippi Longstocking out loud to Lucy these days. Henry and I overhear. One time I asked Lucy if she wanted to go with me on an around the world sailing trip. She looked up from the reading, nodded, and looked back down.
I’ve long thought that she and her pals are rather Tom Sawyer- and Huck Finn-like. One pairing in particular.
(Henry has had a lingering cold so hasn’t been out as much. But even when healthy he might not have as much Pippi in him at this point. He’s more in a daydreaming mode than an action one right now. But he does have a lot of energy: I think he’d rather just run through the brush and flop in the snow and wrestle, or whack at bushes with a stick. He’s said he doesn’t like biking and skiing much—I think they’re too particularly something for him right now. He might draw a Pippi cartoon, though—if she could be half squid and didn’t need a storyline.)
Our wintertime entryway…
Kids ski.
Kids play.
Lucy and Lauran. Last year. They take off skiing around the yard and park whenever they can. This day it was 15F and they didn’t bat an eye. They don’t like me taking pics of them, though. It’s like stalking wild animals to get a photo. I hear their chatter then try to get close enough without detection. Usually they think to make ugly faces and wreck the pics. This time they were absorbed in their snow world.
This is how our porch looks this time of year. Proper!
