The Last Day of Winter

Posted by Rich - Where I come from, the last day of winter and the first day of spring are usually pretty similar to the days we experience in the middle of the winter. The first day of spring in Upstate NY was typically pretty cold with noticeable accumulations of snow still on the ground and large piles of dirty, hard packed ice acting as a miniature Continental Divide in most shopping center and mall parking lots. We would observe the calendar notation of the first day of spring still dressed in hats and gloves and boots, but also with a careful low-level excitement. You did not want to jinx the arrival of warmer weather by wearing shorts on a 40-degree day, or playing basketball outside in the icy puddles on the school playground. You always had to be careful; if the Gods of the Seasons noticed you were not paying Winter it’s due respect, then you could get zapped with a late April snow storm, or experience cold, rainy weather through Memorial Day.

So we would patiently bide our time, daring sometimes to wear your snorkel jacket unzipped or a baseball hat in place of a knit cap, but trying not to be too blatant. Sometimes, you would become confident enough that Winter was ending and not even bother to look for the glove or mitten you lost. And if you did lose a glove, it was always the left hand one- always- that went missing. At this time of year I usually had and still have 3 or four unmatched right-handed gloves of different colors and materials.

But still you waited, carefully, and watched for the signs of Spring. That first day of just rain, for instance, that made things sloppy but melted enough snow to reveal green lawns not seen since last Thanksgiving. Or the first 50 degree day you could walk home from school and notice that the snow banks you had climbed over for months were gone or not nearly as large as they had been, and the sidewalk and streets looked noticeably wider as the glacial piles of shoveled and plowed snow slowly receded. The occasional faint smell of earth, dirt, ground, unfrozen mud, whatever you may call it, gave afternoons a promise of warmer weather that would arrive and stay until summer ended.

Then it came, the TRUE First Day of Spring for us: It was marked as the first sunny afternoon you got your bike out. You may have had a jacket on still, and long pants, but when you could wheel your 20 inch two wheeler out of the back of the garage and feel the freedom of riding once again, then you felt Spring finally had arrived. On the First True Day Of Spring, you can take off that jacket and not have to hear your Mom yell at you to put it back on before you catch a cold. Toys you may have received as Christmas gifts could finally make an appearance outside. The baseball bats and gloves came out in the sunshine. Kids would spontaneously appear at the field behind the grade school and start hitting and throwing. Of course, you had to be careful of the remains of snowdrifts in left field stubbornly hanging on towards the shady side of the school building, and the gooshy ground behind third base. However, none of this dampened the absolute joy you felt playing in the warmth of the sun and the promise of longer days in the coming months. You knew in the back of your mind it could turn cold again tomorrow, the wind and rain could blow hard, and it could quite possibly even snow again once or twice.

This weather change could almost certainly be attributed to some kid, some where, who annoyed the Weather Gods by wearing shorts or acting too summerish too quickly and ignoring the fury Winter could still muster if provoked. But on this, the True First Day of Spring, it was the day you got your bike out of storage in the back of the garage and rode the newly widened spaces of the sidewalk and streets wet with melting snow banks. This was the day to forget about knit hats and lost gloves. Who could be blamed for getting excited that summer was on it's way, and jump the gun a little by wearing shorts? In retrospect, however, I probably should have put my jacket back on when my Mom told me to.

Is it me, or is that snow bank taller than average..?

Like most natives of the Snowbelt, I feel a strong obligation to document the snow fall amount, whether it be through photos, drawings, or verse. I think it may harken back to our days as grade schoolers, when exasperated teachers tired of helping students put on and take off layers of winter clothing and boots for recess. Eventually, they would just announce that we were staying in that day and making paper snowflakes or drawing pictures about winter instead of trudging outside into the cold once again.

Upon his retirement in the early 1990s, my Father used his newly acquired video camera to make a record of the snowfall he had battled all winter long . The resulting tape could easily be shown in any art-house cinema as an avante-garde short subject, and it is my opinion that it would certainly be awarded an “A” if it was submitted as a final project by a student majoring in film at a university. The entire video lasts over 5 minutes, and begins with a wide shot of our modest 1950’s ranch house in Utica NY surrounded by snow drifts. As this was the first winter my Father was fully retired, the driveway and walks are scraped down to their bare macadam and flagstone surfaces respectively, and the snow is piled impeccably along the drive and walkways. There is no sound except for the wind blowing through the subdivision, and the middle of the afternoon on a weekday in February contributes to the lonely Edward Hopper look of the subject. The sound of my Father’s feet crunching on the snowpack of the street can also be heard as he approaches the house and pans the large mounds of snow on both sides of the driveway and surveys the walk way excavated to our front door. I can’t imagine WHY he shoveled the front walk so neatly and invitingly, as anyone who knocked on the front door would hear “Go around to the side door!” yelled to them from the inside. The video continues with a view of that same side door, and then moves into the backyard and all the way around the family room and bedroom added on in the 1970s, takes long views of the tall snow drifts obscuring the clothesline poles in our backyard, examines the snow carefully piled up around our back walk, and finally reaches the back door. There is no sound except for the wind, the sounds of my Father breathing as he steps and films at the same time, and an occasional muttering of ”Will ya look at that snow” as he completes this long, continuous documentation of the winter’s accumulation. The initial screening of this short subject took place at a family gathering right after it was made, and was promptly dubbed ‘The Harrington Drift Project” by my brother and sister in law. The only thing this video lacked was something to place the drifts and piles in proper scale, which is understandable since all five children in my family had long since grown up and moved out by the time my father retired. I learned at an early age that by positioning a small child in front of a snow drift, you can help persuade disbelievers that it was indeed a heck of a lot of snow you were shoveling that particular winter. Over the years, my brother, three sisters and I often posed in our snow suits in front of the large drifts in my back yard for a snapshot each winter. It of course helps that members of my nuclear and extended Harrington family seem to be shorter than average in height. The Great Blizzard of 1966 was made to look even more impressive by the fact that none of the five children in my family were over age 11 or over 5 foot tall at the time. This short stature goes back generations on mother’s side as well as my father’s, and may help to partially account for our desire to document tall piles of snow. Looking back through family photo albums reveals different generations of photographs, some sepia toned, some shot with a Polaroid, and now some digital, of young Harringtons standing in front of a pile of snow. I often used my own children as this scale prop when I felt moved to make a pictorial record of the season. Somewhere in North America, there is a branch of the Harrington family that averages over 6ft tall when fully grown. I doubt any of them live in the snowbelt, and if they did, they would probably find winter even more intolerable without being able to pose in front of large snow drifts and the small mountains at the end of the driveway towering over their heads.

Perhaps the author and illustrator Virgina Lee Burton had children that were above average in height, so her documentation of a large snow fall had to be in the form of a children’s book about a powerful snow plow. Given she was born and raised in New England, it seems likely that “Katy and the Big Snow” is based on an actual snow storm, and with her above average-height children to clear the end of the driveway for her, she could devote time to writing a children’s book about a little snow plow and drawing pictures of the tractor in front of a oversized snow bank. The magnitude of the storm certainly impressed me when I read it. I think it helped that Katy was smaller than average.


Notice in this pic my dog Maggie used for scale... and she is about average in size..


Here where I live in Newtown Borough, instead of Katy, a red 1956 International Harvester dump truck is used to clear the snow. I love seeing it being used, and even when it plugs up the end of my freshly shoveled drive way with a large mountain of snow, it is hard to shake your fist and curse at the life-sized Buddy-L truck that just drove down your street. And just like Katy, this Buddy-L has a job to do. Unlike Virginia Lee Burton, I am not moved to write and illustrate a children’s story based on the snow plowing exploits of a 1956 International Harvester (unless I was given an advance from a book publisher , that is..!). I AM, however, inspired to create some paintings based on this red mechanical marvel that growls up and down my street with a flashing yellow light on top. So, here are the works in the preliminary stages; I will post other progress pictures as I complete work on the pieces. I only hope I made the truck look really big, so when July rolls around I can show the painting and tell people “Yep, I shoveled out the end of the driveway after that monster rolled by…and by the way, here’s a photo of me standing in front of a snowdrift back in the Blizzard of 1966…” (Posted by Rich)


Hopefully, I can get these drawings turned into paintings by July...