I grew up in central New York, lake effect country, so I walked into my first Vermont winter thinking I already knew what I was in for. Mounds and mounds of snow, ice under the snow you can’t see until you’re already sliding, the specific kind of cold that gets into a car’s locks and won’t let the key turn, all of it was familiar. What I wasn’t ready for was how mountain weather changes on you, how a clear morning at the clinic can turn into a whiteout by lunch in a way that flat lake effect snow, for all its volume, never quite did to me growing up.

The clinic doesn’t close for weather the way some places do, animals don’t stop needing care because it’s snowing, so I’ve learned a whole new relationship with driving in it that I thought I already had down. My first February here I was too nervous to clean off my own car properly one morning, just brushed the windshield and left the rest, and got pulled over about it two blocks from the clinic by an officer who was more amused than angry. I’ve since gotten better. I now keep an actual scraper in my bag instead of relying on the sleeve-of-my-coat method I got away with for two decades back home.

What I didn’t expect was how much I’d end up liking it anyway, once I stopped being embarrassed about getting it wrong in front of people who’d lived here their whole lives. There’s a specific quiet a Vermont snow morning has, driving in before the plows have fully caught up, that’s different from anything lake effect country gave me, even though I’d have sworn before I moved that snow was snow and I’d already seen all of it. Turns out you can grow up in real winter and still have more to learn about a different one.

The mountain part is what actually took the longest to internalize. Back home the sky did what it was going to do over a pretty flat stretch of land, you could watch weather coming from a long way off and know roughly what you were in for. Here the same storm can dump nothing downtown and bury a road fifteen minutes up toward one of the ski towns, and I learned that the hard way driving out to a farm call my second winter, clear the whole way until the elevation started climbing and the visibility dropped to almost nothing within a couple of miles. I called the clinic from the side of the road to say I’d be late, which nobody minded, apparently every tech who’s driven that route in winter has a version of the same story.

Priya grew up in the Boston suburbs and has her own complicated relationship with New England winter, more snow-tolerant than actual Vermonters give her credit for but genuinely baffled by how seriously people here take chains and studded tires. Marcus is a native and finds the whole thing hilarious, my getting pulled over that first February especially, he still brings it up sometimes when it starts snowing during game night, asking if I’ve scraped my whole windshield today. I take it fine at this point. It’s a story that’s earned its spot.

Six winters in, I’ve stopped thinking of myself as the person who grew up in real snow and finally started thinking of myself as someone who lives here now, which is a small shift but a real one. I still keep a photo on my phone from that first February, the cop standing next to my half-cleared windshield looking more bemused than anything, mostly to remind myself that I didn’t arrive here already knowing everything, whatever central New York taught me.