Wonder makes it an uplifting time of year

How graceful are these times of seasonal in-betweens . . . afternoon sun that still gets your jacket off and tans the skin two weeks after Wildcat opened its mountain with 4 feet of new snow. Hours scraping barnacles off the propeller shaft of the sailboat, then taking the skis down from the storage rafters for a tuning.

And of course the annual PR battle for bragging rights as to which resort opened first and would turn in the longest season. It all happens in that marketing window between Halloween and Thanksgiving. This is preseason. The next weeks onto Christmas are, with today's snowmaking capability, the legitimate early ski season.

It didn't used to be that way, but we're not into ''used to" today but what's coming just ahead. Meaning, for every skier, boarder, ski industry folk, dogsled rider, and, yes, snowmobiler, there is great heartfelt interest in what kind of winter it will be. And that is why, of course, you're still reading, because this column always deals in the truth about the coming winter. Relying on an artful blend of observation and wisdom ranging from Herb Stevens, the ''Skiing Weatherman," and Dr. Dewpoint to prognostications in the Old Farmer's Almanac to the fur thickness of squirrels' tails and woolly bear caterpillars, by the time all information is mixed in the stewpot, we know exactly what to expect from the winter that astronomically begins in just more than one month.

There is a nice preview going on this weekend over at the Bayside Expo where the annual SnowSports Expo is underway from today through Sunday.

We generally don't take Halloween snow seriously -- usually because one heavy dump that early, even before the first frost, disappears with the next day's sunshine. And yet this year has already been a bit anomalous in that Killington was not the first New England area to open, a claim that always puts Killington in the ski news first.

But in late October, two storms roared through the White Mountains dumping a record amount of snow on Mount Washington and just nailing Wildcat, the ski area just across Pinkham Notch from Washington. Sure enough this venerable ski area got a 4-plus-foot pasting, hustled its operation into gear and announced the first ski area opening in the East on the last weekend of October.

Moreover, this was not one of those sketchy preseason storms that gets people up to ski on a couple of ribbons of slush. The snow was deep, thick, and substantial, ''a three-day slice of paradise," says Irene Donnell, a spokesman for the mountain and one of Wildcat's most enthusiastic skiers. ''The conditions were just fantastic, like midwinter. Not a rock anywhere."

And though a bit of autumnal reality has set in with some wet gray stuff about everywhere Tuesday, Donnell adds, ''Everyone really got pumped up on that weekend. They're ready to ski."

Herb Stevens, who is getting into his 53d season on skis and who reports from just about all the ski areas in the East, predicts some cold air flowing in between now and Thanksgiving, giving us ''some good holiday choices."

In northern Vermont, Jay Peak is coming with a much expanded bedbase this season -- 250 slopeside units -- and more to the point, this rawboned mountain that gets the most natural snow of any area in the Northeast has beefed up its snow system and put ''the hardest offseason work we've ever done" to improve the gladed areas because, says Bill Stenger, ''glades are such a popular product right now."

Glades, of course, need lots of natural snow, because of the impractibility of making snow in the middle of the woods. And Jay, whose glades have to rank with the all-time best, if not top the list, begins with its 25 feet of natural snow yearly, much of it coming from the nearly permanent cloud that clings to the peak throughout the winter.

Well, now that the weather predictions are about as clear as the mist cause by snow melting into a tropical fog, we turn to the impeachable source of weather savvy, Old Farmer's Almanac. Last year the publication's take was for a pretty severe winter, and if you lived along the coast it certainly was that, with major Northeast storms and near-record snowfalls, many of them doing the interior ski areas little good.

The first month of winter, says OFA (and suspicions arise when the forecast is more or less arbitrarily broken up by month-demarcations) will be exceptionally cold, with seasonal temperatures in Maine, but ''a degree or two colder" in southern New England.

We are due for a snowstorm in mid-December, and then a real blaster over the Christmas period, which seems pretty good news for ski areas unless it falls on the travel days and, as has been the case other snowy winters, scares skiers out of driving north.

January is predicted to be a kind of roller-coaster month, with deep cold, not much snow early, followed by a classic January thaw and then some clear cold weather through the end of the month.

February does not seem much of a snow month, with a few of those tropical rainy periods in the mix, which of course in New England results in those freeze-thaw cycles that make those, uh, solid bottoms we like to carve our edges into. Toward the end of the month we should have some heavy snow in the north country with rain south. Exactly what that means -- maybe rain in Boston and snow in the mountains -- is hard to tell from the OFA text.

But early March looks typical for the month, with some very heavy snow in the first weeks, and then warming up for rain by St. Patrick's Day. So sayeth the Old Farmer's Almanac which, after working the averages since it's founding 214 years ago, gets it right more often that we might expect.

As for other climatological indices, I measured a woolly bear caterpillar with my calipers the other day. Nearly half an inch in diameter -- pretty thick and fuzzy in this weather prognosticator's book.

It's enough to get my skis in the vise, and I'm applying the wax.

At long last, it's time.