Last Sunday we had coffee on the sunporch. It was warm and sunny. The cats were out there till the sun set, happy and energized. Woody worked on the fence around my vegetable garden [the upper garden is mine because it has raised beds; the main garden is his; the lower garden we share as it’s a mix of raised beds and regular soil]. Monday it snowed so much Dale went home after an hour and a half while he could still drive the intervening roads and Woody returned from his office even earlier. it snowed and snowed. It was less icy and less heavy than the last snow that had already partly melted but the wind was howling all day into the night. We got about 6-7 inches. Woody spent much of Tuesday morning clearing the drive down to the road [we live on a hill]. Dale came in Wednesday to help me and we plowed through a lot of what had piled up. We even got to send a poetry submission out. We had a little more snow Thursday, maybe another half inch. But the temperature has begun to plummet. We’re having very cold nights – down to seven or eight above zero. Our resident birds are extremely hungry. At least that provides kitty television watching them come and go in a fairly orderly fashion to the feeders. Extreme cold intimidates me. I’m aware of being a warm blooded creature without fur in a landscape in which I could not survive without external heat. I am still feeling liberated from letting my secretary go. It was by far the right choice for me and probably for her also. Getting much more work done and much more writing. I had a disturbing incident this week. An officer from a synagogue in Michigan contacted me about using a poem of mine in a shivah service [for the dead]. The name of the poem was not familiar to me. I wasn’t sure if the poem in question was actually mine. I asked him to send it to me, which he promptly did. it was part of a poem contained in my collection THE ART OF BLESSING THE DAY: Poems with a Jewish Theme published by Knopf and still very much in print. They had taken part of a poem, given it a new tf but simply took the poem for their own use and freely changed it. It’s the Association for Progressive Judaism. I have before encountered arrogance from rabbis who imagine they can write better than a professional writer. When I was the poetry editor of TIKKUN, every other week I’d get a poorly written poem by such a person. They just appropriated my work and rewrote it the way they pleased. I am very upset. I don’t like to be pirated, but to be rewritten into something prosy and flaccid is more disturbing. I am calling them the Association for Progressive Plagiarism. More snow today, more snow tonight, more snow tomorrow – but so far it’s not like last winter. These are small contained snows, anything from an inch to at most three inches. Last year at this time, walls of snow surrounded us. Our car was lost in a snowbank. Huge daggers of ice hung from the roof. Many roads were almost impassable. Walking was dangerous. This so far is not anything like that, for which I am very thankful. And sometimes the sun comes out and sets the world ablaze with blinding light. The snow is still beautiful. It doesn’t get dirty on our land. it remains pristine crisscrossed by blue shadows and the occasional cuneiform of bird tracks. Each season has its beauty and its purpose. Without winter, no spring. When I lived in San Francisco, I missed that sense of spring, because there had not been anything I could call winter.