Eureka. Last week, we had more snow days. I could follow deer and rabbit tracks in the snow. I could crunch through fields of snow. I was delighted to find genuine icicles hanging from my evergreens. Gray stone walls gleamed with a frosting of white. Winter-bare trees and bushes were festooned with shimmering blossoms.

I have had a long wait this winter for real winter days to arrive, snow days that make winter my favorite season. It’s perverse, I know, to prefer cold, icy winter to the budding days of spring, to sunny summer days when roadside daisies and violets are in bloom, to the bronze and gold and deep red foliage of the fall. It’s especially perverse since I am not a snowbird. But I am dumbfounded in winter by the way a deep snow transforms familiar landscapes.

Crossing the West Tisbury cemetery in a snowstorm one winter, I totally lost my way. Under the snow-laden trees edging Glimmerglass Pond in another snowstorm, I could not make my way through the woods to find a macadam road. Sooner or later, I knew, I would find it, but for a brief time, in my mind I was adventuring on an Alaskan snow field or in the land of reindeer at the North Pole. Marooned for a week in the blizzard of 1978 when my husband and I lived at Indian Hill, it was magical to be surrounded by snow. Happily, we had light and heat and food and water, but there was no getting out in any way except on foot. Mornings, we watched the black crows foraging on the white snow outside, and took occasional forays to see what other wildlife might be out.

In my Almanac of Country Wisdom, I learned that when birds fly low, there will be much snow. Unfortunately, I was not watching the birds in flight as I should have been in fall, nor was I looking at the fluffiness of squirrels’ tails or the soles of rabbits’ feet — both a sure sign of a cold, though not necessarily a snowy winter.

I may however have one more chance at seeing a good snowstorm before spring arrives. If the needles on my pine tree turn west, according to the almanac, it’s a sure sign of a heavy snow in prospect.

I wish I could tell east from west on my white pine to make sure about that, but here’s hoping.