The Four Seasons (December 30, 2012)
Last night’s snowstorm brought the first fluffy white dump that stuck since my husband, Kevin, and I became resident curators in late 2011. A mere three inches accumulated, but it was proof enough that we’d made our first sweep through all four seasons as Bay Staters. I’m commemorating with this reverse chronological slideshow that demonstrates, in broad strokes, our progress on the house in the last year. The winter shot shows off Kevin’s clapboard restoration (we can’t believe how creamy the color, Farrow & Ball Tallow, looks against the snow—compared to the shot that follows, from mid-October, in which the same color looks pearly white). In that fall photo, we had just sown tall fescue grass and covered the seeds with weed-free salt marsh hay for protection above that pink diagonal line (below it, the embankment gets steep, so we’ll plant a low-maintenance groundcover there in spring). The summer shot illustrates our meadow experiment, when we let the grass grow higher than a foot tall just to see how it would look (Kevin hadn’t yet painted the doors or started work on the siding at that point). The spring photo is a repeat, from the Reuters shoot last spring, but it’s the only one from the season that shows the front facade.
But a bit more on the winter wonderland we awoke to this morning, inspiring this post: Cross-country ski trails lace the state park we live in, and when I trekked through it this morning I saw only one other pedestrian on foot like me; everyone else was gliding through the pristine powder on skis. This clever couple had harnessed themselves to their gorgeous huskies—strengthening my rationale for buying skis by winter 2013, once we’ve finished the major work on the house, and for possibly choosing this hardy breed when we get a dog in the spring.