New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

Our first lick of snow!

Wednesday 10/30/2013

It started snowing here at 9:39 this morning. Not a big snow but enough to see and experience as "the first snow" of the season locally. The ground is far too warm to have it stick and the day was warming so the snow falling from the sky didn't last very long.

I was driving to Concord and when I got out of my truck in a parking lot I couldn't help but stick out my tongue to try to catch a flake or two. Instantly my mid rewound to a September afternoon in 1956. I was walking the half mile back home from first grade in Easton Maine. That's way up near the Canadian border. Somehow it was then that snow and I formed bond. I remember the ting on my tongue as a snow flake struck and the smell of first snow. In fact I remember I was walking by a garage-like shop that repaired wooden potato barrels. Here too this building had it's own wooden smell about it as I recall. Just sticking out my tongue this morning melted away some 57 years in an instant. Funny how some instances in our lives linger with such freshness.

This was not the first snow I saw this week. Monday I was headed up to Randolph NH for a meeting. Just south of Franconia Notch on I-93 I could see a snow squall off to the west. At that same moment it was misting and raining on my truck and just to the north a whole mountain side was bathed in a sun shaft with a rainbow blazing the sky in between the sun spot and me. Kind of a surprising moment to behold.

This week I have had two hard frosts at my house. The first this fall. Our potted flowers and plants were pretty well melted down Monday night with a low 20's showing on the thermometer Tuesday morning. My lawn remains lush green as are the fields about. We have had a long slow transformation into fall and winter technically is just a few weeks away.

But indeed we are well into fall. My partner in an hour mid afternoon hike yesterday reminded of that. As I walked along a wood lined path around three yesterday it was my giant shadow that proclaimed it to be well into fall. By my measurement my shadow was 20 feet long in front of me as I walked north along the wood road. And we've had a windy week stripping even many of the oak leaves off the trees. Only the beeches are holding fast to most of their leaves as we head into November.

November the gray month. Soon the gray leafless trees will blend into a gray sky by mid afternoon erasing the horizon in places. Here fall smells will replace the loss of visual stimuli. From fermenting leaves to the smell of gun smoke while sighting in our deer rifles or a shot at a deer will make magic of fall.