We had plenty of storm last weekend, power out four times, ice under snowpack, huge drifts.  Ira just dug the car out today.  We had been using the truck with its 4-wheel drive all week, at least since he spent two days shoveling down to the road.  Much of the snow is still around, but finally there are some patches of bare ground here and there. So now we’re getting another storm this weekend with winds if not to 75 mph to 50 mph?  More snow?  More wind?  More trouble?  We lost a magnificent white fir I planted 42 years ago – the wind just snapped it off.  I wrote a poem about it today. I’ve had quite enough winter already.  Normally I like winters here – a wonderful quiet time to write, to see friends, to read and cuddle and play with the cats.  But without power, no writing, hard even to read, and so forth with much whining. I had one of my three annual eye appointments Friday to check my glaucoma, renew prescriptions, check possible conflicts with a pill I might take for my fungoid toenails, show the doctor an enigmatic letter from my insurer in bureaucratese I could not decipher.  Turns out to mean little.  Letters from our insurer never bear glad tidings, but this one at least was very minor. All my seeds are ordered and the ones that are coming, have come.  Soon it will be time to start the first batch in little peat pots.  One of my new stories is out in this issue of MS, “Saving Mother from Herself.”  I like it one of the best of my new stories. The friends who were supposed to come over Saturday night but of course couldn’t [and they were without power or water at home] are supposed to come tomorrow night.  And we had even cleaned the house for them before the storm hit. I am hoping that the storm will hold off most of its intensity and snow until they’re back safe at home.  Dale and Stephen and we will play some games. I want to make a pot roast – potatoes maybe or maybe poppy seed noodles?  Many root veggies cooked with the grass fed naturally raised beef.  We don’t eat much beef and I’ll only eat that kind.  It costs more but it’s worth it.  Plus we have beef so seldom the higher cost of what we do eat doesn’t matter much. I’ll accompany it with a green bean [our frozen]-pecan-dried cranberry salad.  I am thinking of making a dark chocolate mousse for dessert.  If I do, I’ll make it after supper tonight. This was a week of catching up after the storm, writing poems, answering interview questions for a couple of zines, reading Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon and Emma Donoghue’s short stories, Astray, and dipping in and out of C.P. Cavafy’s complete poems. Lilith will be sending me a huge pile of submitted poems for me to go through this coming week.  I’m the poetry editor.  I just accepted being an advisory editor of the revived December magazine.  I always thought it was a silly name but it was a very fine literary magazine in its day and I hope will be so again. The laundry dragged out this week over several days.  Couldn’t do it when the power was out.  Left me with a wet load.  Then I’d get into it and then the power would go out again.  Ad infinitum. Actually not, since finally the power came on Tuesday and has stayed on since [crossing fingers, crossing toes, spitting over my left shoulder, throwing salt over my right shoulder, praying to Zeus – or whoever runs winter storms.  Maybe The Great Polar Bear of which the North star is a part.]  We had very high tides during the long storm, but I noticed an unusually high tide Thursday too, almost all the way to the Route 6 by Blackfish Creek and a couple of other places. The wild turkeys are back with us.  The gobbler was displaying his fan today but the females ignored him.  I love to watch them.   They are living proof that birds descended from dinosaurs and they make many exciting noises.