3 March 2026

The snow is falling AGAIN as I tap this out, Dear Reader, and much as this Florida cracker appreciates its beauty—somehow still a novelty after over 27 years in New Hampshire—enough is enough.

Propane and plowing are pricey but necessary expenses these many days.  And this past month has been a challenge in other ways, both on the home front and the world stage, where thanks to our Felon-in-Chief, we now find ourselves embroiled in yet another open-ended war in the Middle East, unconstitutional from its inception and untethered from any consistent rationale.

That’s the big stuff.  But much smaller stuff still preoccupies.  In the 23 days since a crash rocked my equanimity, I’ve recouped the insurance payment and bought a new car, the same model as my beloved but now totaled VW GTI, but with five more years of high tech features to reckon with.  I spent 36 minutes beside Jimmy the salesman in the passenger seat asking basic questions about how things work; even he had to look up how to tune the radio, buttons and knobs having been replaced by screens with multiple layers of access.  I now feel only slightly less anxious about driving this computer on wheels than when I exited Rochester Volkswagen in “Opal” (named for the color VW styles “white”) five days ago.  I’ll adapt, and the heated steering wheel IS very nice, but the learning curve is and will continue to be steep.

I’ve also become stuck once again in the tar baby that is the 99-year land lease of commercial property in Ft. Myers that my maternal grandfather C. C. Senseman left his two children, my mother Virginia and my uncle Kenny, now both long gone, and the lease then inherited by their children, two of whom are also now departed, my beautiful blonde cousin Beverly and my equally beautiful blonde sister Jane.  The 1967 lease was re-assigned in 2006 to an unscrupulous new renter, whose scofflaw lawyer brother has ever since taken advantage of what was always a bad deal for us joint landowners, Grandpa Senseman’s descendants.  Consistently delinquent in paying the very modest rent for this property (atop one parcel of which sits the strip club Babe’s), this scoundrel has now stopped paying rent all together, having spontaneously decided to contest the rent due, an amount and payment schedule established in 1967 which he has paid, however tardily, for the last 20+ years.  Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of Dickens’s Bleak House has nothing on a legal quagmire that has tormented four generations of my family with no resolution in sight. 

The malfeasance of this unscupulous shyster of course pales in comparison with the high crimes and misdemeanors to which the Felon-in-Chief subjects my country and the world, but the fact that such damaging corruption continues uncurbed on so many levels is dispiriting.  One looks for compensation in small victories:  the Supreme Court disallows Trump tariffs; our Republican New Hampshire Governor Ayotte has to bow to the will of her protesting constituents and say no to the transformation of a Merrimack warehouse into an ICE detention center.  And I managed to get my one-year-old microwave, unexpectedly rendered useless by a power failure during the latest blizzard, reprogrammed and operating once more.  And just this morning, after a l-o-n-g campaign battling the New York Times’s inaptly termed “customer service” bots, I finally managed contact, however digital, with a human named Michel who was able to resolve a delivery cockup persisting since 26 January. 

While such victories help sustain spirits, so does a friend’s success: on 22 February, Exeter’s Water Street Bookstore hosted Linda Rhodes’s launching her book, Breaking the Barnyard Barrier: A Woman Veterinarian Paves the Way, about her experience as a pioneering large animal veterinarian in the Wasatch Mountains of late 1970’s Utah.

A feminist triumph is always uplifting. And so, as I have so often found, is art, most recently a couple of fine films.  As Ralph Fiennes, playing the choral master in The Choral, quoted Goethe, “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”  H is for Hawk, the film rendering of Helen Mcdonald’s 2014 memoir, also helped to dispel my worldly cares last Sunday, at least for a few hours.  Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson, and Lindsay Duncan—and the number of goshawks playing “Mabel”—are well worth your time.

And then there’s the reassurance of nature.  I’m keeping mealworms mixed in with birdseed to coax the return of a bluebird who has made a few visits to my feeders of late.  I haven’t spied the pileated woodpecker nearby, but I heard his cry the other day competing with my growling stomach’s borborygmus as I sat with my binoculars quietly searching.  And I had a lovely albeit slightly illicit snowshoe adventure the other day navigating a former snowmobile trail now forbidden trespassers by an owner who has changed her mind about allowing machines on her property.

The snow was powdery but very deep, so that each snowshoed step could sink as much as 6-7 inches, requiring a lot of extraction effort.  Okay, good for cardio, I thought.  And I managed to find ways around the several places where little tributaries of still flowing water that ultimately becomes the Oyster River threatened to sink my progress.  At one point I did, however, almost get stuck, and discretion, the better part of valor, kicked in.  I was alone, no one knew where I was, and I’d just watched William H. Macy get clocked by a falling branch in the film Train Dreams I’d watched the night before.  I re-traced my steps instead of forging on, and arrived safely back home, my hair plastered to my doubly capped head.  The image reflected in the mirror gave me a welcome glimpse of my mother Virginia, who would have been happy for my safe return.

As for the astronomical, I missed this morning’s blood moon eclipse.  I was at the window at 6.00 am, but the moon had already dipped below the tree line to the west, obscuring the setting sphere. 

Maybe I’ll catch the next one in 2029.  We’ll see how much blood there is under the bridge by then.

In the meantime, Dear Reader, hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day.