Mamacita says:  As I sit at the dining room table with my new laptop Hal and look across the living room and out the big window there, I can see our huge shagbark hickory tree. Today, of course, it’s covered with snow. The raised flower bed around its trunk is buried in the snow. I love this big tree, and so do the squirrels. Most days, the squirrels are running up and down the trunk, and back and forth across the branches and limbs, almost constantly. The cats like to sit on the back of the big living room chair and watch.  I always know when there’s a squirrel because the cats stand up on the chair and bristle.  When there are birds, Millicent chirps loudly in their language, and Vera beats on the window glass as if it were a drum.

When we’re buried in snow, as we are this week, it always makes me think of the day I got married.  The church was buried in snow on that day, and few people were even able to come to the wedding because the snow was just too deep to navigate.  My new husband had to borrow his father’s pickup truck to get us to our little house, and once we got there, we were pretty much completely snowed-in for a month!  Every time the city and county managed to dig out a path wide enough for cars to travel on, it would snow again and fill it in.  It reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, when she wrote about how the railroad would dig out the tracks only to have them filled with snow again before the trains could even go through.  When I was finally able to drive to my teaching job some twenty miles away, it was like driving through a tunnel; the snow was piled up so high on both sides of the road.

But even now, all these years later, I think of that time when I look out of the windows and see the snow piled deep.

My mind’s eye can also see my small children, building snowmen and making angels. . . .

We’re trapped in this house, but it’s a pleasant experience.

Of course, if I hadn’t stocked up on milk, bread, and toilet paper last Monday, my attitude might be quite different indeed.

My son is also here; he’s just as trapped as we are.  He’s worried about the pipes in his apartment freezing, but there’s nothing he or anyone else can do about it, so he isn’t dwelling on that, but rather on all the square meals he’s getting while visiting Mommy’s house.

The snow is so deep, they’ve even cancelled COLLEGE!  And that is something that just hardly ever happens.

This is the view from the French doors in the back of the house, off the deck.  So far, we haven’t even seen any deer venture out of the woods.

The snow is beautiful, smooth and pristine, but to tell y’all the truth, I like it much better when the snow is mussed up, after little kids have played in it.

Sigh.  All those sleds in the garage and under the deck, going to waste.

I’m doing a lot of reading.  Life is not really life without a good book to look forward to.

As I was telling Fausta earlier today, when I’m snowed in, I like to bake.  It helps heat the house, and it satisfies something in me; perhaps it’s dormant domesticity.  My husband and son are having homemade lasagna for supper, and I’m going to bake a lot of bread later tonight.  I might even get my 30-year-old sourdough starter out of the freezer, feed it up, and get it going.  I might as well, because we aren’t going anywhere for the next few days.  To which I say, “Cool!”