It’s been way too long since my last post -forgive me – it’s been a rough time of things for us these last couple of months, particularly this last month. My mother died a month ago today. So much has gone on in our lives since that it’s hard to balance out everything. She suffered from a stroke 5 months ago – I look at that time as extra time we had with her. She had a second stroke which ultimately took her life five days later. She had just had her 86th birthday January 28th. I miss being able to pick up the phone and have one of our two hour long conversations. And I will not be able to give my Mom a hug again, like I was able to hug my Dad after not seeing him for a year.
It’s been a relatively mild winter up here on the mountain, although there is a lot of snow on the ground and especially deeper in the woods. The weather gods were kind to me the weekend I had to drive down to join the rest of my family as we said our goodbyes to her at a private family graveside service. Mark usually keeps a snow tally but didn’t keep up with it as he had in past winters. All in all, I believe we had much less snow than we have had in previous winters. Although, I never did get an opportunity to ice skate – the snow that did fall – stayed around and never melted back as we didn’t have the usually thaws that would ease the snow depths. This year we had a storm that dumped 3 feet of snow all at once – thankfully that was an anomaly, must storms only delivering 3″-6″ at a time.
The snowmobile trails were iffy depending upon the altitude of where you were riding – the higher your elevation the better off the snowpack. The lake didn’t freeze up completely until mid-February, less than a week later 3 snowmobiles went through the ice – luckily no one was injured, just wet. But the snowmobiles didn’t get hauled out of the lake until 3 weeks later!
We had many visitors though to the Marleywood Little Free Library. The day Mom died, I put up a notice and invited the community to enjoy the beautiful Wentworth Wooden Puzzles that she adored spending her time doing. She gave me so many puzzles to share with the library before she died and my sister has since sent me more puzzles from her collection which I plan on adding to the library soon.
More and more visitor are signing our little guest book and it so fun to see and learn of some of the adventures they have in coming up to see Zeno and the library. We have had groups of hikers, snowshoers and snowmobilers! Our children’s section of the library has been growing thanks to the community and their contributions. I have my eye on another cabinet which may put into commission one day, if the library needs to grow.
As we march forward into spring, I am looking forward to the warmer months and I will do some spring cleaning in the library. I have a bunch of spring and summer themed puzzles to put into the library plus a number of books which will freshen up the selection. I have a book called Mud Season which I plan on adding to the library soon once I have finished reading it.
This is the perfect book for this time of year seeing how we just finished with the spring of deception and mud season has started in certain areas on the mountain, Hemlock Brook Road for one.
The time changes tomorrow morning – we will spring forward which is so ridiculous. I wish we would just stop messing around with the time and just stick to either being on Daylight Savings or not. As far as this time of year goes though, we are definitely in for our share of muddy weather and to be honest with you mud season usually keeps us off the roads more than the snow and rain. Unfortunately, we have to take my son to physical therapy on a regular basis which will force us up and down the road more often than usual. He had arthroscopic knee surgery to repair a bucket lateral meniscus tear 10 days ago, reminding me how life goes on.
Marleywood Little Free Library 