Help, I'm a New Englander living in the NW! Gah!
There is some sort of instinct derived from living on the East Coast that causes an internal belief in the seasons. What do I mean? On The East Coast the seasons dictate when things get done during the year. You do roofing projects in the summer, cover the pipes in September, October is for canning and the last mowing of the lawn till spring. Also you make sure you get your snow tires and rock salt.
November is the last chance to do any outside projects that require things to be thawed, and those things should be done by the second week as it has been known to blizzard as early as October. Third week of November is the big shopping time. I am not talking holiday shopping, but grocery shopping. Buying a fifty pound turkey is not unheard of-complete with head and feathers- this will get you through Thanksgiving and in all liklihood there will be a storm in the week after, so the leftovers will prevent the need to do groceries in white-out conditions.
December is for dare devil Christmas decorating-ever tried puting lights on a frozen roof? It is also for those last minute shopping-though most folks I know do their holiday shopping in October.
January- April is for inside entertainment. Pull out the board games and the candles, chances are the power will go out at least five times. It happens in the big storms when snow weighs down the trees and they bend or fall on power lines, or the ice storms that come between the blizzards, they ice everything down, power lines are often the first things to fail. All winter folks leave the taps on. Not to waste water, but to prevent the pipes from freezing.
In May and June it is all rain and muck, the rivers are flooding, it is not unusual to watch the rivers jump their banks. But folks in New England have been living through this for 400 years, we have gotten used to coping with it. In May you thoroughly expect the basement to flood, so you pull all the important things up and put them in the attic, or if that is leaking, you stick them in the garage/ extra room. In the end of June you get all the plants in the ground, for the short summer growing season.
Summer: you spend as much time as possible outside. In Maine you might have 2 1/2 months of summer the other 9 1/2 months are nastiness, knowing that it is a waste of good sunlight not to be out enjoying it.
It is October, back home they have had snow already, and the frosts have already come into play. Here I feel delayed, like the weather is procrastinating...
