Moving to the cloudiest county of the very cloudy state of Vermont (ranked third) perhaps wasn’t my best decision. But after moving eight times, from west coast to east coast and south (Miami!) to the great white north, all before my first child turned four, I arrived determined to stay put, no matter what. Back then I could not even imagine what “no matter what” fully meant… and looking back over the two decades clouds have been the least of my worries, but they do roll in every November in full force, along with the time change and shortened days, making sunlight like gold scattered illusively in miner’s dreams.
Up north one must learn to cope and utilize all we can, in terms of catching those all too important rays. If you happen to live in any zone higher than say 5, (and that probably represents 3/4’s of our USA), then none of this will even apply to you. You have sunshine and warmth, stuff grows in your yard most of the year, heck, you even have continuous gardens; but here, up in zone four, we don’t. Frost comes in early October, and then November brings every shade of grey; so how does one survive?
Get outside! Walk, run, skip, if you can, or like what happened at our place today, do chores. Never a shortage of work to do outside: putting gardens to rest for the winter months ahead, storing lawn furniture, getting snow shovels in place, even the snow-blower needs moving to a ready-when-needed position in the front of the barn. Great time for planting bulbs too. And on days like today, when the temperature soared all the way to a high fifty, and the sun blazed within that blue blue sky, all these tasks become a delight.
Suddenly, even this often dark spot becomes the best place “no matter what.”