Rose is a North Country Girl through and through.
She loves all the seasons here--Winter, Spring (popularly known as Mud Season), Summer (her favorite!) and Fall.

In the winter, Hitty Rose has a lot of outdoor fun--but she is also expected to help with winter chores. She carries in wood from the wood shed, and stacks it in the woodrack. The wood was cut last fall, and she helped her parents with that chore. First, she stood at a safe distance with her mother while her father cut down the dead tree. Then, after he had it cut into lengths, everyone loaded it into the wagon. Father drove the tractor and wagon back to the house, and all three of them unloaded the wood. Father always splits the wood with a maul, and she helped to stack the pieces in the woodshed. She says she carries each piece three times before it ever gets burned! She never loads the woodstove, but her mother says that would be a good thing to learn in a few years.

When the ashes get too full in the stove, her father rakes them out into a metal bucket, and Hitty Rose takes them to the back yard. She sets the bucket into the snow to make sure the ashes don't have any coals in them. That's the easy part--the hard part is remembering to go out later, empty the ashes over the garden area, and set the metal pail into the woodshed for next time.

She also helps to shovel out the driveway and around the mailbox. If she is at her Grandparent's house, Grandma pays her $5.00 to shovel a path to the bird feeders and around the back porch.

Hitty Rose has a puppy named Trixie, and even if it is snowing and blowing, she still has to take her out for a walk. Besides the walkies, she also brushes and feeds Trixie. Right now, Hitty Rose is trying to teach Trixie to sit pretty.

Hitty Rose is in the 8th grade, and is looking forward to next year, when she will be attending the High School in her school district. She always jokes that her favorite class is lunch (because she sits with her friends, and they giggle and talk, and then giggle some more) but really, she loves English the most. She takes Spanish, and tries to practice what she has learned with her friend Jorge (pronounced Hor-Hay), and he practices his English with her. History is confusing sometimes, but she got some after-school tutoring, and has it mastered now! She has tried out for the school basketball team, and is looking forward to basket-ball camp in the summer.

The school bus comes bright and early (or, as Hitty Rose says, in the winter it is dark and early!) at 6:40 every school day--which is a pain, but when you live in the North Country, sometimes things are a long distance apart. Someday she wants to be a Spanish teacher, or maybe a writer. Or she might be an artist. Father says she ought to get really, really good at basketball and get a college scholarship, but Hitty Rose says basketball is just for fun.