Hello and welcome on back to the blog after a couple of months of hibernation! We’ve been busy at work renovating our guest property to get it ready for your summer visits, and launching our Substack, so the blog has had to take a nap.

I’m happy to be back in the new year with a new experience to share: our very first snow! After spending almost a month back home in New Orleans, we arrived to Tennessee bleary-eyed from a long drive at 11 p.m. Wednesday and knew the day ahead had one goal: to prepare for what forecasters had been calling an unusually heavy snowfall that was scheduled to begin early Friday morning.

While our home here is surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, we’re actually in the Tennessee Valley, which means even during the long winter months when lows drop into the teens on a regular basis, snowfall is pretty rare, even as it paints the mountains around us a gorgeous ivory. There’s some meteorological reason for this, but I’m fine with it remaining a mystery to me. All I know is: no one here is really ready for snow, and definitely not us. In fact, since we bought our home here in 2022 we’d seen at most the slightest dusting of snow. So we were really excited!

And Thursday was the day—our only day—to prepare. Like everyone else in the area I rushed to get firewood and water and an assortment of canned foods I’d only eat if I was truly starving. We made sure our guinea flock and our duck flock had fresh bedding in their coop to keep them warm. The cats and our little doggy Fox were given pep talks about the weather to come (“if it gets cold, we must cuddle”) and we hunkered down.

Friday we woke up to one of the most beautiful snowfalls I’d ever seen. The flakes were gigantic, falling in globs that stuck and froze to the ground, forming piles of white powder everywhere. Eventually the entire landscape of our property was white, which became the perfect canvas to watch the scurrying squirrels and chipmunks and the fluttering of the bright red cardinals.

It snowed all day. I divided my snow day into shifts: walking the property taking photos and sighing with joy; reading in the bath tub; writing by the fire; and holding various pets up to the window to show them the snow outside, their wet noses leaving little fog marks on the cold glass.

It snowed into the night, and we woke up today still seeing flurries coming down sporadically. I’m so grateful we got to see our home in this new way: blanketed in a five inch deep layer of white. I know snow is not groundbreaking, but for two South Louisiana boys who ended up in the mountains, it sure felt really special. And after a year that somehow is only eleven days old but feels like it’s been a decade, I’ll take the joy where I can get it.

I hope you enjoy my photos from around our home during the snowfall! If you want weekly posts from us (three a week!) head to our Substack and join in on the fun. More photos below for you!

xoxo

Beau

Our first big snow at Benwood | January 2025!