Winter Seems to Be Coming Early

Don't worry, it's not here yet...

But it is clearly on its way. There are preliminary reports of a nor'easter heading our way for this weekend. Blustery strong winds with a boatload (no pun intended) of rain. Sounds very late autumn-ish, doesn't it? And it is not late autumn, it's only half over. But the trees are already mostly bare and I suspect that the high winds for Friday night through Saturday will strip the last of the leaves from the already most bare trees. Sigh.

I am feeling very unwell. I am hoping it will pass, but I think I know better. I think Atlantic City will have to wait until a couple of weeks from now.

Back to the original topic. When I woke up on Sunday morning in Keene, New Hampshire, at about 06:00, it was dark, 20 degrees outside, and there was a full layer of frost - more like solid ice - on my poor exposed car (I have a garage to park in at home; up there, no garage. Well, they have one, but like most people, it ends up being used for storage. When we bouhgt this house I allowed it to be used for storage for a short time and then cleaned it out in full and decreed that I would be parking in it! I was determined to never have to clean ice and sleet and snow off of my vehicle again!) Anyway, that was what told me (that and having to be in to work the next day...) that it was time to migrate south again. But I can only migrate to the mid-Atlantic region, as this is called in most maps and the Old Farmer's Almanac, and that means that I am only putting off the inevitable, and not getting away from it in full.

True, our winters are generally much less severe than in interior New England. And our location makes it a crap shoot. We are sometimes south of the rain/snow line; sometimes north of it; sometimes right on it. It is roughly around here that the difference between snow and rain or the inbetween and most feared of all conditions, freezing rain, might be. Some winters we avoid a lot of the snow and Sussex County gets it. Other years, we are right in the middle and get hammered with freezing rain (by and far the most dangerous of all weather conditions. And yet other years we get snow - one fall right after the next. Two winters ago was like that.

So I may be wrong. We may not be hurling towards an early winter. But then again, we might be. I guess we will just have to wait and see.