I've lived in Vermont for 22 winters. Twenty-one and a half, if you want to get technical about it. That's just a flash, barely a generation, in a state that takes generations quite seriously. But I'm not a state, only a person, so that amount of time in my one life is quite a lot. And it's especially quite a lot of winters for someone who doesn't like winter all that much to begin with. Just before Christmas 2002, my (then) husband and our two (now dead) dogs left Portland, Ore., moving away from a miscarriage and toward a job. We went on to have two Vermont children, who are now young adults, and yes, I know — I know — it doesn't mean they will ever be considered true Vermonters. But it doesn't matter. They're already making their way out into the world. Soon I will be, too. This is my last winter in Vermont. Next year I will move out of state — to where, I still do not know — now single and free, accompanied by a dog that looks just like my first dog, except smaller and with stripes. Patterns are patterns, and don't we just love to repeat them. When we moved to Vermont all those years, somehow decades, ago, we drove a rented RV with the 800 number of the company blasted across the side. Remember 800 numbers? It not only advertised the rental RV business but also how much we didn't know what we were doing, didn't know how to expertly drive a boxy recreational vehicle, and also that we were possibly heading in the wrong direction, far north and into a blizzard. But the direction we were headed in was right and true, even if that first winter was particularly brutal. The storm we arrived in, at the beginning of January 2003, ended up dumping 17 inches of snow. The only time the daily high was above freezing all month was the 31st, when it finally crept up to a toasty 35 degrees. There were almost two weeks of subzero nights that month alone, in our drafty rental, a slowly returning-to-the-earth farmhouse in the middle of a field. When I had interviewed the previous summer for my job at the design studio Jager Di Paola Kemp (now Solidarity of Unbridled Labour), Michael Jager asked if I snowboarded or skied. I told…