A White Christmas in Maine

Between living in California and Japan over the last ten years I only made it back to Maine for Christmas a handful of times. The high cost of flights and often tricky winter weather in New England have been dissuading factors to making the haul to see my family at Christmas. While living in California Christmas involved taking advantage of short ski lift lines with friends in Lake Tahoe. I spent Christmas '05 eating a fantastic meal of Sendaigyu shabu-shabu (fantastically tender beef in a Japanese soup type meal) with a dear friend in Tokyo. On Christmas '06 I shared dinner with a random German traveller I met who was passing through the same small town where I was doing research in Thailand.

So, to switch things up this year I headed to Maine for a week at Christmas. Fortunately, the flights were uneventful and the snow held off until I made it to the Maine border. From that point snow fell for the whole next day resulting in 8 new inches of the white stuff on top the 10 inches or so from the previous storm. The rest of the week was clear and sunny, perfect weather for wandering around the forest and visiting friends and family. Here is my parent's house after the snow storm.















Soon after the fresh snow my Dad and I headed out on snow shoes up the old wood road that was created years ago in order to facilitate hauling out wood for the woodstove by cart and ox. Yes, I know, strange (and perhaps a bit funny) to some of you. There were about 5 years where my older brother had a pair of oxen and during that time much of the good summer days were spent with dad cutting firewood and hauling it down to the house. My younger brother and I had the job of stacking the logs in the cart, and unloading them at the house. Fortunately we usually got to ride down in the cart back and forth and that was pretty fun. Here is a lovely pic of the morning sun on the clean fresh snow.





















Many of the paths are over grown now, the forest taking back over its territory as many of the roads are not used anymore. One path remains though up to one of our balsam fir Christmas tree lots. Now that I am studying forestry I am more interested in the forest and had the chance to learn a lot from my Dad on our walk. He pointed out the red pines, hemlock, golden, white and grey birch, and oak trees. I also learned that rabbits and porcupines both have an affinity for hiding out and munching on hemlock trees - we saw their tracks in the fresh lite snow. I like this picture of a falling over tree, you can see the branch structure along with the ice and snow layer in the early morning light.

















Later in the week I wandered down to the swamp area between our house and the main road and snapped this pics of the soon-to-be-frozenswamp and the golden winter grasses in the crisp winter sun.