We were short a little connective tissue for the first episode, (transition takes) so we shot some time interval footage of the sun rising on a stone wall, Silas bringing in a lantern, and Silas observing the distant horizon through the window, in anticipation of a storm.    I have experienced a few midwestern winters, and we live in a little valley that enjoys four or five snows a year, but we had to make a credible shot at New Hampshire syle cold.  As a native California, I tend to think of a New England winter as an isolating wall of ice that descends sometime in late November and doesn’t melt until late May, but both friends and historic journals tell me differently.  Winter wasn’t the crippling, snow-bound sentence we imagine, at least not all the time.  

Samuel Lane, a New Hampshire farmer and shoe-maker, recorded the winter of 1770 as mild, so we have a little snow and a little bare winter ground in this episode, and the weather here, praise be, was very accomodating.    The story takes place over a few weeks time,  and that allows for some day to day transitions, melt off, and accumulation, but here and there we found ourselves anxious to explain weather changes, hence the transition takes. 

Before scheduling this session, I reviewed my growing inventory of high definition farm footage and found no pleasing vistas of the house, in winter, with a single lantern glowing in the window.   That would have required my waking at 4:00 AM, checking  batteries, finding some sort of hood for the camera and traipsing around in the snow before dawn.   As unlikely as that would have been, I still hooked up about a dozen USB drives and rooted around in the video thumbnails, hoping against hope.   I found nothing but the farm in spring, summer and fall, with old man winter left out.    

Note for next year:  chronicle the storms.