'The Last Vermont Winter': An Essay by Kimberly Harrington

I’ve lived in Vermont for 22 winters. Twenty-one and a half, if you want to get technical about it. That’s just a flash, barely a generation, in a state that takes generations quite seriously. But I’m not a state, only a person, so that amount of time in my one life is quite a lot. And it’s especially quite a lot of winters for someone who doesn’t like winter all that much to begin with.

Just before Christmas 2002, my (then) husband and our two (now dead) dogs left Portland, Ore., moving away from a miscarriage and toward a job. We went on to have two Vermont children, who are now young adults, and yes, I know — I know — it doesn’t mean they will ever be considered true Vermonters. But it doesn’t matter. They’re already making their way out into the world.

Soon I will be, too.

This is my last winter in Vermont. Next year I will move out of state — to where, I still do not know — now single and free, accompanied by a dog that looks just like my first dog, except smaller and with stripes. Patterns are patterns, and don’t we just love to repeat them.

When we moved to Vermont all those years, somehow decades, ago, we drove a rented RV with the 800 number of the company blasted across the side. Remember 800 numbers? It not only advertised the rental RV business but also how much we didn’t know what we were doing, didn’t know how to expertly drive a boxy recreational vehicle, and also that we were possibly heading in the wrong direction, far north and into a blizzard.

But the direction we were headed in was right and true, even if that first winter was particularly brutal.

The storm we arrived in, at the beginning of January 2003, ended up dumping 17 inches of snow. The only time the daily high was above freezing all month was the 31st, when it finally crept up to a toasty 35 degrees. There were almost two weeks of subzero nights that month alone, in our drafty rental, a slowly returning-to-the-earth farmhouse in the middle of a field.

When I had interviewed the previous summer for my job at the design studio Jager Di Paola Kemp (now Solidarity of Unbridled Labour), Michael Jager asked if I snowboarded or skied. I told him no, and also? I wasn’t going to learn. And I never did. When I began working at JDK, I was one of the few married people and probably the only non-snowboarder in the place. I didn’t want to draw any additional attention to my stodginess and advanced age (35, adorable), so I pretended that I thought this insane climate we had moved to was normal. Mostly I didn’t comment on it at all, probably because if I opened my mouth I might scream.

When I walked from the studio to my car that first winter, wearing a coat I had previously considered a winter coat, the wind off the lake was so cutting that I felt like I wasn’t wearing any pants. One time a coworker (and new friend) and I were about to get in her car to go grab some lunch. She went to kick a chunk of dirty, snowy crud off her car, and a piece of the car fell off with it. Weeks later, I was riding in the elevator with other coworkers and they started griping about yet another subzero day. That’s when I finally squeaked, “Are you saying this isn’t normal?” and someone replied, “Noooooo, not like this,” and I practically shouted, “THANK GOD.” But those first few winters in Vermont were reliably harsh, and everything about them — the abundant snow, the arctic temperatures, the godforsaken windchill — became normal to me. They were a test to be passed.

I was pregnant by the fall of our first year in Vermont. As every parent knows, having kids will force you to do a lot of things you would never choose to do otherwise. For instance, you will need to eke entertainment out of long, cold days and months, or everyone will turn on each other and you will turn on yourself, too.

We chopped down Christmas trees. We caroled in the (unheated) Old Round Church in Richmond and another time went sledding down that hill right outside of it, one of the most gorgeous places to risk frostbite and human collisions in all of Vermont. We dressed up for The Nutcracker, albeit while wearing snow boots, because it had iced overnight. My kids and I made a human chain trying to get from the truck to the sidewalk in front of the Flynn without sliding all the way down Main Street like a bowling ball heading helplessly toward a bunch of pins. We went on sleigh rides, so many sleigh rides — every chance I could get, I went on a sleigh ride. We took decadent hot chocolates to go from Lake Champlain Chocolates and watched probably a hundred sunsets, the sun sinking down into a lake that wasn’t yet frozen while the temperature of the air plummeted, sending up cloud banks of steam fog into the air above.

I took my puffy snowsuited kids to Stowe to watch candy canes being made. Then a thrill of a very different kind happened on the way home. An out-of-state car (of course it was an out-of-state car) either hadn’t clocked that cars were fully stopped on 89 heading north or they didn’t understand just how slick an inch of freshly fallen (and still falling) snow could be and went flying by, missing our car by a breath. Then it careened down the hill and spun out into the valley, sending up a huge plume of snow in its wake. I remember thinking: We could’ve died going to see candy canes. What kind of place is this?

It felt like all of Burlington was out there on the ice, freezing and happy.

I’ve survived all these Vermont winters by employing every strategy I could think of other than taking up snowshoeing. (Please, I’m begging you, stop pushing snowshoeing on me. The last thing I need is to be cold and slow.) I’d often hear from out-of-state friends and family that Vermont “looked fun” based on my photos, and I’d respond, “I make it fun.” I didn’t mean that I made it fun for anyone else; I meant I made it fun for myself. I grew up in a rural place, and one thing I learned firsthand is that rural places are not fun, and entertainment wasn’t simply handed to you. You couldn’t just walk down the street and go see a movie or browse a bookstore or catch a drink or three at the nice, not scary, bar, because none of those places existed. I learned early that you make your own fun or you die trying.

One winter, I took horseback riding lessons with my daughter inside a somewhat heated barn, even though I spent most of that time worried about getting thrown, breaking both wrists and not being able to work. Another winter, one of my best friends and I wore vintage fur coats and drove out to Underhill to be early in line for the first incarnation of Poorhouse Pies doughnuts, then walked around Mills Riverside Park eating doughnuts and taking photos of each other, because why not. What else was I going to do? Ski? Be serious.

I wanted to attend better holiday parties, so we started throwing them. Every year it took at least two weeks to decorate for it and an entire week to recover. Some years, it snowed on the night of the party in early December. The magic of it. The absolute and undeniable magic of it. In the thick of those parties, I’d head outside, a little (a lot) tipsy, and take a photo of the party from my front yard, with the living room picture window acting as a frame. The glow and the music and the laughter and the tree — it was everything I had wanted.

One winter, when Lake Champlain froze over, my little kids and I walked all the way out to the breakwater and stood on it — a vantage point we never had before and I haven’t had since. It felt like all of Burlington was out there on the ice, freezing and happy. I remember being in awe that in just a few months we’d be swimming in that lake. Living with extreme seasons will endlessly mess with you. It’ll convince you that you’ll never see a blade of green grass again, and alternately that you’ll never be cold again. Your sensory memory purges itself regularly, like a security camera, just so you’ll stay.

I don’t share any of these memories as some sort of proof that I’m an exceptional person or mother, or even a good one. Some of it was deeply boring, too cold, and often I couldn’t wait for it to be over. My kids inevitably whined or spun out of control or smacked each other, as kids will do. Winter is hard, and it will always look better in pictures, because who can hear anyone scream? But as with anything you look back on, once it’s gone forever you get to be nostalgic about it. You put something good in the bank, and these are the returns.

There is something so laughably puritanical about feeling like you must suffer first to deserve joy.

It’s funny to loathe something but also not want it to change. Early on, the occasional mild winter felt like a relief, even a gift, to me personally. But a run of them is alarming. Every time I arrive at a spring that feels marginally warmer than the winter turned out to be, I wonder if I earned it. There is something so laughably puritanical about feeling like you must suffer first to deserve joy. I may not be a true Vermonter, but having been born in Rhode Island and raised in Massachusetts, I am a New Englander through and through.

The first winter I lived in Vermont, the lake froze over. It went on to freeze four of those first five winters. In the past 10 years, though, it’s only done so three times. We’re not imagining these changes. I assumed winter would always be Real Winter in Vermont, because it was unfathomable to believe otherwise. It’s the same way we assume our lives will somehow always stay the same even though, of course, that’s impossible. Living creatures and ecosystems, climate and relationships change with time. Children grow up, families evolve, friendships end, and after a while working to make the place where you live feel fun can start to feel like work you’re no longer interested in doing.

According to the Agency of Natural Resources, the last 11-year period in Vermont was the warmest 11-year period on record. I’m not a climatologist, but you don’t need to be to notice obvious things. Winter used to be an enemy I’d attempt to temporarily befriend, but over time, it’s become more like someone I tried so hard to push away only to realize that they may be gone for good. I’ve realized that the battle is what made it a little entertaining, actually. Look, shoveling sucks and mincing along in my boots, afraid to break every bone in my body after a spell of deceptively cheerfully named “wintry mix,” is not something I’m going to miss. But I realize now that forcing myself to make the most of it, even part of the time, is what made living in Vermont so specific, bizarre, entertaining and endearing.

Although my desire to leave has nothing to do with weather, I’m surprised that seeing winters diminish has left me with a feeling of sorrow. It’s like watching a big, strong man — Old Man Winter, I suppose — become erratic, frail and more vulnerable with time.

When I find myself staring at the brown, bare trees and the brown, bare ground in January, I wonder what the point is. And with kids grown, there isn’t much I feel forced to do any longer. I stopped going to Christmas tree lightings long ago. I thought I would always line up for sleigh rides (or now, wagon rides, because the ground usually isn’t frozen enough, nor is there enough snow at the end of December for the big sleighs and their runners to glide), but I no longer bother. It’s time to do other things.

There is no perfect place to live. I’ve moved enough in this country to know. It’s always been necessary to pick your poison and your pleasure — country or city, earthquakes or tornadoes, staggering beauty or the choice of more than three restaurants. But now my calculations feel more extreme — what poisons am I willing to ingest, and which pleasures might outweigh them, if any? Do I want more real winters, and exactly what does “real winter” even look and feel like now? As we all know, Vermont was considered a climate refuge right up until it wasn’t, until devastating once-every-100-year floods hit two summers, back-to-back, on the exact same day. It’s harder than ever to predict the future based on past events, because the past is the past and no longer a pattern.

For some people, Vermont is simply a place to visit, to live in their second (or third or fourth) home, a place to perpetuate as a sanitized, idealized solution to everything. But what I learned by living here, even as a flatlander, is that it takes a certain type of person to tough it out. To not arrive only for the easy seasons or long weekends to capture it in stills and videos and report back to “civilization.” It takes a certain type of person to fling themselves into seasonality even when it’s not easy, even when it’s downright miserable and even as it changes. It takes a certain type of person to notice that life and climate and expectations can change more than you could have ever anticipated in less than a generation. And it takes a certain type of person to still feel grateful to have been welcomed anyway, to have been invited to make a life and to raise a family here. I tried to be that type of person, though sometimes I wonder how much I succeeded. I’m leaving, after all.

The original print version of this article was headlined “The Last Vermont Winter | An essay on a changing season”