No, not the Olympics in Sochi (which I will watch on TV in a couple of months along with a billion other people). I mean there’s finally been a snowfall in my area just heavy enough to put a base on the trails. It’s late fall, and winter is impatient to elbow its way in. This morning in Nashua, I spent an hour at Mine Falls Park enjoying the crunch of snow beneath my sneaker-clad feet. The canal is almost-but-not-quite frozen over, and the muskrats have taken refuge wherever muskrats like to go.

Sometimes the season’s first snow in southern New Hampshire pounds us – the Halloween Eve snowstorm in 2011 dumped a foot of heavy wet snow, uprooted countless oaks & maples, and left me without electricity for four days. Other years are more like this – a couple of tentative snowfalls, just to get us ready for the inevitable big ones.

I can pull my snowshoes out of their little nook in the basement and put them closer to the door.  I can  look forward to hiking on those brilliant cloudless days that follow snowstorms. My favorite cross-country ski area has announced that it’ll be open for business this weekend. That means their snowshoe trails are ready to go as well. That’s a special trip for me, too far for weekly visits. A prime memory for me is a midweek trip there a few years ago, the day or two after a storm. There were a few skiers around, but I was the only snowshoer in sight, and I had all that wonderful powder to myself on the woods trails. Solitude, beauty, sunshine, and unbroken powder: does it get any better in the winter?

When the Olympics are broadcast, I will ooh and ahh over the alpine skiers. I have never learned to ski, so seeing people do it at a high level of skill is alarming and thrilling for me. I’ll cheer for the cross-country skiers, who are better-conditioned than most of us could ever hope to be. I’ll watch the snowboarding, which for my money is the most fun event to watch at the Olympics (and yes, I watch the X Games). But eventually, I’ll tire of being a spectator. The snowshoes will be right by the basement door, waiting for me.