In the early part of this winter it looked as though we might be going to have a winter like we had in 1934. That year we had absolutely no snow till the night before St. Patrick's Day.  It seemed as though a lot of the birds that go South in the winter had already returned here. I remember a neighbor who drove a light team hitched to a light spring wagon for a conveyance. Ned Shirley stopped his team and commented on the nice weather and the lack of snow. He thought that perhaps we weren't going to have any winter this year. We were right by the swamp that used to be where a small pond is now and there were Kill Deer Plover all over, looking for places to nest. They seem to prefer to lay their eggs right on bare ground and later on you'll see the young ones looking like a little tuft of cotton perched up on two toothpicks. But they are soon able to get over the ground with amazing speed when the mother calls them.

 It started to snow later that night when we got up the next morning it was to a different world. It had snowed and the wind raged all that night. The wind had blown from the West so our driveway was bare but where Lisle Road was, was uncertain. We had small buildings out back for we hadn't got to keeping cows as yet. We bought our milk and butter from Billy Welch. 

 That day I was busy making paths so we could get to these coops to take care of the birds or animals in them.

 I didn't go to work that night, the first time I had lost time on account of weather. The next day by staying out of the road and walking on the high ground beside the road, I got off the hill down as far as the Wishinsky farm. The road men had opened the road to there with a plow made of a wide plank towed by a truck. You see up till this time, they had no equipment to handle deep snow so the farm roads were not cleared. If you had to go someplace, get your scoop shovel and start digging. 

 The Lackawanna RR were still running passenger trains, so I got to Endicott after walking to Owego. So I stayed at my folks house and walked to the tannery till the end of the week and then caught a ride down the Day Hollow road as far as Haus road and then hiked on home from there. So then all we had to do was shovel our way from our house to Wishinsky's. 

 There were Bill Welch and his hired man, Ben Titus and his son-in-law and Lyle and Les Babcock, who lived in an old house right across from where Peter B. Ellis lives now. By the time every one was equipped with a shovel the only thing left for me was a bark fork with one tine gone from one side that my Dad had brought down to our place. But the wind had drifted the snow so hard that it worked as good as a shovel. 

 We shoveled most of the day. Some places the snow was so deep it was all you could do to throw a shovelful over top of a drift. Finally in the afternoon they broke through to Wishinsky's and they told me to go get my car to see if they had made it wide enough. 

 When I drove the old 28 Model A down the road, I could hear the front fenders shaving a little off the sides of the drifts. 

 Billy was able to make his regular butter and buttermilk run on Saturday with his old 1923 Overland Puddle Jumper as they were called, because he knew where the snow was shallower and by opening a couple fences he could get to Lisle road and then on to Owego.