Barbara Dyer: Snow more
Elm Street, before the Great Fire of 1892. (Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
Upper Elm Street, 1912. (Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
(Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
Chestnut Street. (Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
(Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
Elm Street, before the Great Fire of 1892. (Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
Upper Elm Street, 1912. (Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
(Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
Chestnut Street. (Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
(Photo courtesy Barbara F. Dyer)
Everyone says they don't believe that we ever had so much snow as this fall and winter. Well, if you have lived here long enough, you may remember that we have had really snowy winters and colder temperatures than this year. Some of these pictures will tell you so.
I have written about the harbor being frozen over to Curtis Island in 1971. Also, the salt water was frozen so people could walk from Islesboro to Camden or Belfast around 1916. Penobscot Bay was completely frozen over in 1868 and in 1875, so people could walk to Castine and places. So, as the saying goes “everything old is new again."
The snow drifts were very high when I was a kid, but that was a long time ago, so many of you were not living here, nor old enough to remember it. I remember our driveway when shoveled had snow banks eight feet high. The snow started in November and went into May. We also ice-skated in November and the Lily Pond was a place where they cut ice. That was so frozen we could sail an ice boat on it and go skating after to get warm.
The town of Camden closed off Chestnut Street, from Limerock to Frye Street, and in Millville they closed Grove Street for sliding. It was a wonderful childhood, with lots of exercise and fresh cold air. School was never closed, as there were no buses and we walked in blizzards for a couple of miles, home for lunch and back again. Many children in Hope and Lincolnville walked many, many miles to get to their one room school houses.
After I started working, they only called off going to work one day that I remember. They didn't have a choice because the town could not keep the roads plowed, so no one moved. I went on skis to visit my sister. It was a lovely day off.
Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote:
White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe.
Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,
Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlock bowed with snow."
There is always beauty to be found, if one just looks for it.
Barbara F. Dyer has lived in Camden all of her life, so far.
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