Happy Groundhog Day 2024

 Today many of our favorite weather prognosticators promised an early spring.  They didn't see their shadows. Time will tell if they're right or wrong  Statistics show that Punxsutawney Phil is correct only 39 percent of the time.

Snow on Virginia Woolf's Birthday

 Our January snow has melted overnight. Yet its image comes clearly to mind as I remember that January 25th is Virginia Woolf's birthday. She wrote numerous times about snow and I think often about this passage from "The Years."   "The Years" (1937) was the last novel she published in her lifetime.               

"It was January. Snow was falling. Snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose wing which feathers were falling all over England. The sky was nothing but a flurry of falling flakes. Lanes were levelled: hollows filled; the snow clogged the streams; obscured windows, and lay wedged against doors. There was a faint murmur in the air, a slight crepitation, as if the air itself was turning to snow; otherwise all was silent, save when a sheep coughed, snow flopped from a branch, or slipped in an avalanche down some roof in London. Now and again a shaft of light spread slowly across the sky as a car drove through the muffled roads. But as the night wore on, snow covered the wheel ruts; softened to nothingness the marks of the traffic, and coated monuments, palaces and statues with a thick vestment of snow."