Let It Snow
When I started this post last week, there was snow on the ground in northern New Jersey, our first real snow in two years. The storm that brought it was predicted for the whole northeast, and in terms verging on the apocalyptic. I woke up and looked out my bedroom window to see that several inches had accumulated overnight—it’s easy to gauge inches by looking at the buildup along the railings that edge our deck.
The snow was the fluffy kind, large clumps of flakes that cling to tree branches and shrubbery to create a world in which almost everything is white. But the storm’s effect in New Jersey was not apocalyptic. In fact, I think most people welcomed the snow as a throwback to the days when winter always included snow, lots and lots of snow.
It’s easy, however, to become nostalgic about snowy winters past, forgetting the inconveniences and downright miseries. I recall a winter when it snowed eighteen times. Rising on a chilly workday to face the prospect of clearing enough driveway to back my car out, scraping several inches of snow from my car’s roof, and de-icing the windshield wasn’t pleasant—nor was discovering that my car’s locks had frozen shut. Once the snow had melted slightly during the day and refrozen at night, new perils arose, like parking on a patch of ice and then getting stuck, with tires unable to get traction and spinning madly.
As a related side note I want to mention NORTHERN EXPOSURE. Though it dates from the early 1990s, when it was originally broadcast on CBS, it’s a new discovery for my husband and me now that it’s streaming on Amazon. The premise is rather like that of the BBC series DOC MARTIN, though it predates DOC MARTIN by more than a decade. The MD who finds himself doctoring the eccentric inhabitants of a quaint village, however, is a young MD from New York City and the village is in Alaska.
The connection with snow is . . . Alaska, of course, though the village is not in arctic Alaska but rather on the finger of land that borders the west coast of Canada. It’s snowy but not terribly snowy. (The series was actually filmed in a small town in Washington state.)
One of the things that I love about NORTHERN EXPOSURE is that the set decorators have outdone themselves when it comes to the characters’ homes and other spaces: rustic cabins, of course, and lots of taxidermy. But what’s most fun for me is that among the set decorators there must be a yarn aficionado. Being a creator and collector of granny-square afghans, I’ve long noted that indoor settings in films and TV often use granny-square afghans, draped over sofas or functioning as bedspreads, to evoke a cozy, homey look.
In NORTHERN EXPOSURE every interior seems to include at least one crocheted or knitted throw, sometimes several—and they’d be so welcome on a cold, snowy evening. I particularly love a particular afghan—in Maggie’s house, I think—that uses interesting hexagonal granny squares, though, being hexagons, they are not literally square. It’s quite large, and created from random colors of yarn to suggest a frugal craftswoman using up leftover odds and ends.
As an added touch, Marilyn, the indigenous woman who works as the doctor’s receptionist, is often knitting as she sits behind her receptionist’s desk. It’s fun to notice when she has a new project and observe her progress from episode to episode. Presumably she only starts a new project when the previous one has been completed, but so far (we’re at the end of the fourth season in our watching) just one completed project has actually figured in a plot. She made an olive-green pullover for a character who was joining Greenpeace as a ecological warrior.
Visit the Yarn Mania blog on my website for a look at my own granny-square afghan project:
https://peggyehrhart.com/finished-at-... And if you scroll up and down, you’ll see posts about some granny-square afghans I’ve collected and some of my afghan rescue projects.
The snow was the fluffy kind, large clumps of flakes that cling to tree branches and shrubbery to create a world in which almost everything is white. But the storm’s effect in New Jersey was not apocalyptic. In fact, I think most people welcomed the snow as a throwback to the days when winter always included snow, lots and lots of snow.
It’s easy, however, to become nostalgic about snowy winters past, forgetting the inconveniences and downright miseries. I recall a winter when it snowed eighteen times. Rising on a chilly workday to face the prospect of clearing enough driveway to back my car out, scraping several inches of snow from my car’s roof, and de-icing the windshield wasn’t pleasant—nor was discovering that my car’s locks had frozen shut. Once the snow had melted slightly during the day and refrozen at night, new perils arose, like parking on a patch of ice and then getting stuck, with tires unable to get traction and spinning madly.
As a related side note I want to mention NORTHERN EXPOSURE. Though it dates from the early 1990s, when it was originally broadcast on CBS, it’s a new discovery for my husband and me now that it’s streaming on Amazon. The premise is rather like that of the BBC series DOC MARTIN, though it predates DOC MARTIN by more than a decade. The MD who finds himself doctoring the eccentric inhabitants of a quaint village, however, is a young MD from New York City and the village is in Alaska.
The connection with snow is . . . Alaska, of course, though the village is not in arctic Alaska but rather on the finger of land that borders the west coast of Canada. It’s snowy but not terribly snowy. (The series was actually filmed in a small town in Washington state.)
One of the things that I love about NORTHERN EXPOSURE is that the set decorators have outdone themselves when it comes to the characters’ homes and other spaces: rustic cabins, of course, and lots of taxidermy. But what’s most fun for me is that among the set decorators there must be a yarn aficionado. Being a creator and collector of granny-square afghans, I’ve long noted that indoor settings in films and TV often use granny-square afghans, draped over sofas or functioning as bedspreads, to evoke a cozy, homey look.
In NORTHERN EXPOSURE every interior seems to include at least one crocheted or knitted throw, sometimes several—and they’d be so welcome on a cold, snowy evening. I particularly love a particular afghan—in Maggie’s house, I think—that uses interesting hexagonal granny squares, though, being hexagons, they are not literally square. It’s quite large, and created from random colors of yarn to suggest a frugal craftswoman using up leftover odds and ends.
As an added touch, Marilyn, the indigenous woman who works as the doctor’s receptionist, is often knitting as she sits behind her receptionist’s desk. It’s fun to notice when she has a new project and observe her progress from episode to episode. Presumably she only starts a new project when the previous one has been completed, but so far (we’re at the end of the fourth season in our watching) just one completed project has actually figured in a plot. She made an olive-green pullover for a character who was joining Greenpeace as a ecological warrior.
Visit the Yarn Mania blog on my website for a look at my own granny-square afghan project:
https://peggyehrhart.com/finished-at-... And if you scroll up and down, you’ll see posts about some granny-square afghans I’ve collected and some of my afghan rescue projects.
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