vermont
My nephew, Shannon Moore, who is married to my niece Lindsay, is the Special Teams Coordinator and Tight Ends coach at East Carolina University…Home of the Pirates. Shannon is totally in his element as a coach, having come from the Wyoming Cavalry team, where he and Lindsay met; to Brookings, South Dakota; to Miami, Florida; to Greenville, North Carolina, where he is today. Every move he has made has been a move up in status. For Shannon, Greenville is a personal favorite place. The town is a real football town, and game day is lots of fun. As the coach, it’s like a big celebration, and he gets to be right there in the middle of it all. Shannon thrives on all things football, and I’m quite sure all of the other sports as well.
The cool thing for Shannon and Lindsay is the fact that he has the summers off. They have been spending the summer taking trips here and there. This year, they did a tour of the Northeast. The trip started out in Niagara Falls for Independence Day. Now, I think that would be a very cool place to be for the holiday. Shannon and Lindsay rode on the Maid of the Mist ferry boat to the base of the falls, which is an amazing ride. From Niagara Falls, their trip took them to Portland, Maine. Then they went to New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where 
they went to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The next leg of their trip took them to Vermont for a nice dinner. And what tour of the Northeast would be complete without a trip to New York City. They went to the Statue of Liberty, Ellis island, and the Brooklyn bridge, as well as taking in a Yankees game. They had been there before, but it was right after Hurricane Sandy, so they were unable to go to those places. They also toured the sites for Seinfeld and You’ve Got Mail. Lindsay tells me that it was “waaaay fun!!” The next leg of their trip was a ride on the Amtrak to Philadelphia to see a Phillies Game, the Liberty Bell and the Rocky Statue. Finally they took the Amtrak back to North Carolina. Their grand tour of the Northeast took them on a plane, train, automobile, and ferry. Lindsay and Shannon have set a goal to see all 50 states. In the Northeast, they have seven states left. They only check off the states, when both of them have been to the state.
As if the summer hasn’t been busy enough, Shannon has also been keeping himself busy with golfing and yard work. They will try to get to the beach a few times before fall, and they did make a trip back home to Wyoming 
for a visit, stopping to see Shannon’s folks too along the way. I think it’s been a long time since they have driven back to Wyoming. Lindsay was kind of amazed that it took three days to drive home. In the fall, it will be back too football training again. Lindsay is so cute. Every time I ask her for information, she always adds one little thing, this time she said, “Oh yeah AND I know I am biased but man…he is the best husband ever and the nicest person ever!! Such a kind and generous person!!” I love to see that!! Today is Shannon’s birthday. Happy birthday Shannon!! Have a great day!! We love you!!
As we sit here, with an early Spring upon us, I find it an odd thing to think about another year that had been rather balmy too. The year was 1888, and things were about to get serious along the northern East Coast. The day began with rain, but as the storm really came at around midnight, the rain turned to snow, and the area began to become a nightmare right before the very eyes of the people in the area. Snowfalls of between 20 to 60 inches were seen in parts of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The winds howled…sustained winds of more than 45 miles per hour producing snowdrifts in excess of 50 feet. The area railroads were shut down and people were confined to their houses for up to a week. The difficult thing here is that people didn’t have some of the weather predictors that we have these days, so many of them had no idea what was coming their way, and so had far k=less time to prepare for it.
Areas of northern Vermont received from 20 inches to 30 inches in this storm, with drifts reported from 30 to 
40 feet over the tops of houses from New York to New England. There were also reports of drifts covering 3 story houses. The highest drift…52 feet was recorded in Gravesend, New York. A total of 58 inches of snow fell in Saratoga Springs, New York; 48 inches in Albany, New York; 45 inches of snow in New Haven, Connecticut; and 22 inches of snow in New York City. With the snow came severe winds, with gusts up to 80 miles per hour, although the highest official report in New York City was 40 miles per hour, with a 54 miles per hour gust reported at Block Island. Central Park Observatory, in New York City, reported a low temperature of 6 °F, and a high temperature of 9 °F on March 13…the coldest ever for March. These days Winter Storms have names, but they didn’t then. Nevertheless, the storm was named the Great White Hurricane. It paralyzed the East Coast from the Chesapeake Bay to Maine, as well as the Atlantic provinces of Canada. The Telegraph was disabled because of all the downed lines, isolating Montreal and most of the large northeastern United States cities from Washington DC to Boston for days. Following the storm, New York began placing its telegraph and telephone lines underground to prevent destruction. From Chesapeake Bay through the New England area, more than 200 ships were either grounded or wrecked, killing at least 100 seamen.
In New York, all transportation was at a standstill for days, and drifts across the New York–New Haven rail line at Westport, Connecticut took eight days to clear. Partly because of the transportation gridlock, it was decided that they needed a better system, and the first underground subway system in the United States, opened nine years later in 
Boston. The New York Stock Exchange was closed for two days…something that almost never happens. Firefighters were unable to get to the fires, and property loss just from the fires was estimated at $25 million. Severe flooding occurred after the storm due to melting snow, especially in the Brooklyn area, which was more susceptible to serious flooding. Efforts were made to push the snow into the Atlantic Ocean. More than 400 people died from the storm and the cold that came with it, including 200 in New York City alone. Among them was former United States Senator Roscoe Conkling. The blizzard also resulted in the founding of the Christman Bird and Wildlife Sanctuary located near Delanson, Schenectady County, New York, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.
When my sister, Cheryl Masterson got married, and shortly after her then husband’s basic training, moved to Plattsburgh, New York, it marked a huge change in our family’s life. In fact, our family’s home life would never be the same again. Of course, we knew that having our sister get married and move out of the house was perfectly normal, but we were a close family, and somehow, we just weren’t prepared for that day. Of course, it was especially hard on my parents, and I can certainly understand that, since I have a daughter who lives far away now too, but in many ways, I think Cheryl’s move was harder on me than on my little sisters. Cheryl was the oldest, but she had always been a role model for me too. She had style and class, and I was at the very awkward age of fifteen. It seemed to me that she would be gone forever, and in the end, I was married before she came home, and I had my first daughter too. In many ways, we were both very different people by the time she returned. She was the mother of three children, and I had a daughter and one on the way. We were no longer the children we had been just a few short years before.
Of course, we saw Cheryl and her family during the time they lived in New York, in fact the family made two 
trips and I went up and spent Christmas and New Years the year after I graduated from high school. And the trips were wonderful…a great blessing to be sure. I suppose Mom and Dad might have taken us to the East Coast for a vacation sooner or later, because they did love to travel, but I might not have been still living at home when they did it, so I guess, for me, that this situation opened up doors that might not have been opened otherwise. Nevertheless, I think if we had been given the choice to have the trips to New York or Cheryl and her family living here, we would have taken the latter for sure. Be that as it may, our trips to New York allowed us to see the ocean, eat Maine Lobster, and see Niagara Falls. We saw Washington DC, Gettysburg, the bridges in Vermont, and many other sites up and down the East Coast. I suppose that looking back, we would have to admit that having Cheryl living in upstate New York, was in all reality, the opportunity of a lifetime…were it not for upstate New York being so very far away…that is.
Those trips were a lot of fun, but they did not come even remotely close to having our family all together. And with each trip came the inevitable goodbyes and the parting tears. It felt like our hearts would just break…
especially Mom and Dad, and poor Dad had to be the strong one all the way home with five weepy women in the car with him. He had to be the one to finally say, “We have to go. This is just too hard on everyone.” He had to do it because our sadness would have kept us there in tears for hours, if someone didn’t break us away. He had to be the strong one…because we sure couldn’t. Once Cheryl’s husband’s time in the service was over, they moved back to Casper, where she and her kids have lived ever since. Once the time was suddenly over, we could look back on it and it seemed to go by quite fast, but in the midst of it, that time felt like our world was falling apart. In reality, it was simply that we were no longer children, and life had taken the next logical step for us. I’m just glad that we are mostly closer to home now, with just a few exceptions.
