The Hendricks Family Experience

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An early winter snow storm dumped over 10 inches of wet snow.   The heavy snow blanketed the trees and weighed down the leaf-covered branches, causing all sorts of trouble.  Every couple of hours during the storm, one of us would go outside and shake the snow off the branches of our little trees.  This was the only way to keep the branches from snapping.  While we stood outside you could hear tree branches breaking all around the neighborhood.  This storm  even  brought down a few large trees.  The power went out Saturday afternoon and was not restored until Monday evening.  Losing power is a recurring theme here in New York.  We have had many opportunities to use our generator.  Many of our neighbors left their homes for the weekend because they didn’t have heat or water.

I was glad I had made Sarah’s birthday cake the day before.  I toasted coconut for the top of her cake in a pot on the wood burning stove.  This is not the most comfortable place to stand for long periods of a time so dad pulled out the camp stove to cook dinner.  On Sunday morning we brought in our pumpkins off the porch, only to discover they were frozen solid.  It took most of the day to thaw them out enough to carve them.   On Halloween,  Sarah and Mason spent the evening with friends.  Junior stayed home to pass out candy  to the few die hard trick-or-treaters.  Alexandra and her friend trick-or-treated around the block, but only found a couple houses passing out candy.  I didn’t want to hike all around our neighborhood with the little girls, so Dad and I decided to take the three youngest girls trick-or-treating to a friend’s neighborhood in Washingtonville.  This was one of the strangest  Halloweens I have ever experienced.  A few neighborhoods in Cornwall even postponed trick-or-treating until Wednesday.  This is the first time I had ever heard of postponing Halloween.  I, for one, was happy no one came trick-or-treating to our house on Wednesday.  I was ready to have it over with and move on.