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Vermont’s First Snow Has Come and Gone (Looking for the Light, 5)

BethKanell
7 min readNov 11, 2024

The first snow has come and gone.

In these days of social media, plenty of us post photos of how amazing Vermont suddenly appears, dusted with that sparkling magic. This time the snow came down heavily at dusk and all evening, so I needed the outdoor light on for taking a photo through the living-room window. I’d hoped there would be tracks in the morning so I could finally discover which night marauder has been activating the motion-sensor light on the barn: racoon or possum or skunk? But the morning only showed spikes of green grass poking through clumps of snow already melting. The ground’s not cold enough for the snow to stay. Catch you next time, you clever four-footed visitor.

The other thing I’m itching to do is fill the bird feeder with sunflower seeds. I bought a sack of them from the farm store two weeks ago and emptied them into the lidded metal trash can in the barn. It’s the best protection I’ve found from the squirrels and chipmunks that take shortcuts through the shelves of garden tools and stored paperwork. The cost of those lidded cans has escalated, but I suppose it’s equivalent to a week’s worth of groceries, as it was forty years ago. Inflation catches us all in a sort of suspended sense of time, thinking things should cost the same as before … and they do, sort of, because they’re in the…

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BethKanell
BethKanell

Written by BethKanell

Braiding loss, joy, love. Award-winning poet & author of YA adventures like This Ardent Flame; The Long Shadow, more. bethkanell.blogspot.com; member NBCC.

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