Someone once asked Billy Welch about the duration of winter in these parts and he answered, "Well, of course you have January and February and then six weeks of damn, nasty weather in March!" That's about what happened this year. We've had all our real winter weather in the last two weeks.

Soon after we moved up here on this hill, I remember a year when it actually appeared that we weren't going to have any real winter. I would drive to work in the afternoons through deeply rutted roads and drive home through ruts that had been frozen near the tops.

It got to be the middle of March and we'd had two weeks of nice spring weather. I remember hearing the Killdeer Plover calling as they looked over a swampy pasture right below our house, probably selecting future home sites. That evening, it began getting colder. It started to snow.

It snowed and the wind howled all that night and when we got up on St. Patrick's Day we had all the snow we'd missed all winter. The wind had swept our driveway clean but there was no indication of where the road was out along the level to the top of School House Hill.

I dug paths to where we kept the chickens and animals and had to miss the first day of work due to weather conditions since we had lived on the hill. The next afternoon, by keeping to the higher ground, I worked my way down to the first farm. The road men had plowed the road that far, using a V plow made of two wide planks on the front of an old Ford truck. I walked to Owego and took the train to Endicott. I stayed the rest of the week at my parents' home on Davis Avenue and caught a ride down Day Hollow Road and walked home. I'll never forget that train ride to Endicott - the only vehicle I saw on the road up along the river was an old Ford with the brass radiator and little narrow tires and a little plume of steam coming from the radiator cap.

The next day, all the men on the hill were organized and started to shovel out the road. There were six of us, and by the time everyone was outfitted with a shovel there was none left for me and I ended up using a bark fork. The wind had packed the snow so hard that it worked alright. We started at the end of our driveway and some places the snow was so deep we had all we could do to throw the snow over the top of the drifts. I don't remember just how long it took us to reach the first farm and open road, but when we did, someone said to me, "Go get your car and see if we made it wide enough." I walked back up the hill, got the old '28, and drove back down the road. Every little ways I would hear something go 'ching' which meant that both front fenders were shaving the sides of the drifts.

The other day I read what Garrison Keillor had to say about the month of March. He said God created March to show people who don't drink what a hangover is like.