We've had some kind of strange weather for December though I see on TV that some places are getting all kinds of winter. Just had a call from my nephew Dennis, who lives a little north of San Francisco. He says their snow there comes in flurries and because of the nearness to water, it doesn't stick. He wanted to know when my next birthday party was going to be and I told him that if nothing untoward happened it would be the 31st of January, at the Moose Lodge, where we had it last year.

     We haven't had a snowplow by as yet to attack this last fall. Makes me think of how it was when we moved on the hill in 1931. Back then they had no equipment to handle deeply drifted snow. They had a V plow in Owego that they pulled with a Ford truck. If farmers wanted to make a plow for themselves, they would search through the woods for a Pepperidge tree. This was a slow growing tree with no straight grain. Inside the grain was all curled so the wood was unsplitable. This made for a very long-lasting plow.  

 A few years ago the people that handled the snow, got two Waters Snow Fighters. These were big powerful high wheeled V plows but with no wings. This meant that in ordinary snow they worked fine. But we had a storm with high winds and they got stuck on Lisle Road in a high drift right between the little Bradt Cemetery and the school house that Billy Welch always called the Lisle Road University.  The trouble was that the V plows would go alright until the snow started coming over the tops of the Vs. 

 A neighbor was watching, Ted Bennett, and one of the men on the plows asked if he could get another man and scoop shovels for both. Ted came and got me and the men on the plow asked us if when the snow started coming over the top if we would jump off the drift onto the plow and shovel off the snow that would have fallen in. They would back down the hill and then ram the drift until they would get stuck and then wait for us to do our part and in this way we got the plow up the hill. 

 The next year the plows had wings and what this did for all the people that lived on hilly side roads.  

 Even after Billy bought a secondhand Overland touring car, the one they called the Puddle Jumper he would follow the same path that he had driven with the team up Welch Road to first get a good sweep and let down the wire then around the edge of a swamp that is a pond now.  Let down the fence and back in the road to the first driveway that would get him back on high ground.  Follow that til he would cross the road and then stay in the lee of the bushes and drifts til he came to Wishinsky's and plowed road.  After he delivered his butter he would go to Holmes & Watkins feed mill where they would fill the back seat with 100-pound sacks for cow feed which was ballast to get him back home.