New Mainers Look For Reassurance Winter Won’t be That Bad. Haha!

It's a little late now...

I was on a Maine-based Reddit thread, and I started seeing a sizable handful of posts from folks who just moved to Maine within 2021. And overwhelmingly, their questions mostly revolve around the winter. Some wondering just how bad it is, others wondering if they actually need a snow blower, because where they come from, they'd just shovel.

Then the same person brags about how where they just moved from, they only get a few inches at a time. Then others seem to think we live in the arctic circle, and that we're about to get relentlessly pummeled, every single storm. In reality, us Mainers know that it's literally all those things.

In Maine, it's always a little from columns A, B, and  C.

What I always found unique about Maine winters, is that we have every form of winter, all throughout the winter. Sometimes we get an inch, sometimes it's 20 inches. Sometimes It's wet, heavy snow, sometimes it's powdery and fluffy. Sometimes we thunder when it snows.

The one constant that really sets apart though, is that winter here in Maine just lasts forever. Especially up in the county. But generally, you can count on winter really getting going by December-ish, and drags on for months. Like... in 2020 we got snow in May in the Bangor area. The county still had snow on the ground at the beginning of June.

There are plenty of states that get it worse than we do.

In a lot of ways, we have nothing to complain about. Imagine living in upstate New York. With their proximity to the Great Lakes, they get truly pummeled with snow. Like, stroms are measure in feet, not inches. Or in the Rockies, with their mountain-effect storms. They last for days. In Maine, it might last 24 hours, and we'll get a foot and a half.

We are lucky, in a way. I'd like to think that at least the rumor of snow has kept a few people from discovering our awesome little state. As long as they think it's no fun to live here, we can keep this place mostly to ourselves. Call it what you want, I call it protecting my little slice of heaven.