When we opened the blinds last Friday morning, it was to a world of whiteness. The snow shovels are staged, and all that was left to do was rummage in the garage storage box for the windshield scraper and the runner rug for the slate front patio (which gets very slippery in the cold weather). I even dug out the roof rake, just in case we get a huge dump of snow like we did last November.

The branches of the Red Oak tree are bare. We didn’t get the gutters cleaned, but next week’s forecast promises at least one day we can tackle that, providing the leaf debris hasn’t frozen solid within by then.

A winter’s worth of reading and writing ahead — that, and an hour of extra sleep Saturday night!