For the first winter that I can EVER remember, New Englanders are uniformly complaining about the weather. The more usual head-shaking about changeability of the sky or stoic shrugs have given way to groaning.

Snow has relentlessly fallen every few days – or at least it feels that way.  With each accumulation comes heavy lifting, re-arranged schedules, worry about roads and rooves.  I have been living on my heating pad.
A friend of my brother-in-law died of a heart attack shoveling. Last night, there was news about two calamitous building collapses. Up in Salem, my sister’s building keeps producing lethal icicles, four feet long, two stories up, directly above her walkway.
This week found both K and me out on the roof, chipping, sweeping, scraping, and chiseling. The guy at the hardware store joked about using an acetylene blow torch. I laughed, but kind of wondered whether it might work — water was coming in through our kitchen ceiling, and nothing to that point had yet stopped it. Thankfully, the ice melt that I bought worked. I flung an entire box up into the valley where two parts of our house meet. Within hours, I could put away the pots that had been on the floor catching water.
I took comfort in knowing that were the ceiling to cave in, it would invariably happen when my husband was in Korea or Russia, and he was home (though he was NOT here when that awful slush and frozen rock-like stuff had to be moved around).

And, now it is supposed to rain and I find myself wondering, “What will THAT do?!”  I am driving to Maine today to help celebrate a friend’s birthday. Wish me luck!! I hope the freezing rain has come, melted, and gone. In the meantime, I am loving the squirrels who visit our deck.