Wintry Scenes Welcome The Season

By Kendra Bobowick

Slipping from the sky earlier than usual on December 21, the sunlit Taunton Pond cast shadows beside sheep and cows, and did little to diminish drifts of snow Monday, the year’s shortest day. Winter began in Newtown with a sky that was bright, startling blue, and brief as daylight quickly faded.

Looking down on the town from a peek on Castle Hill is the town’s notorious panorama of the flagpole, church steeples, and rooster perched atop the Newtown Meeting House, all pushing through a canopy of trees covering that hillside.

Not always grown in with branches and bows, Town Historian Dan Cruson noted: the hill was once treeless with a field where children first paused at the crest, then pushed downhill on sleds. At Taunton Pond was another winter vista.

With buckets and nets at their feet where they had worn a patch of trampled snow along the water’s edge, T.J. Stuart and Dan Butler reeled in their lures for one cast after another while they fished the frigid pond. From one bucket came a splash. Looking out over the pond for more than an hour, Mr Butler had at last made a catch where his line unraveled and dipped into the pond.

Around town were eves dripping with icicles. Men and women were out hurrying through the cold, faces turned toward the sun as they bundled into their down coats and knit hats. Dogs wagged their tails, enjoying the crisp air as they tugged their owners along Elm Drive.

Another frosty sight caught attention along Route 302 near the Paproski’s Castle Hill Farm. Mid-field where one tree’s limbs reached stark, gnarled fingers into the backdrop of hills and sky sat a tractor and its rider made of hay bales and capped with the weekend’s snowfall.

Despite the cold wind and several inches of snow smoothing the rocky landscape, sheep and cows pushed wet noses through to berries and blades of grass for a taste of something to eat. In one field or another along Huntingtown Road, the animals appeared undisturbed by winter’s freeze, nestling beneath their wool and thicker coating.

The season’s first day of winter met residents with sparkling white scenes across town, revealing touches of bucolic life in a town covered in places by pristine snowfall, and in other places the prints from boot or hoof.