I spent most of yesterday wondering if I might be coming down with an illness. I just could not shake the tiredness. I did manage to get the housework and the shopping done, but I also took a nap, skipped my writing group, and went to bed early, and that seems to have done the trick: this morning I'm feeling much livelier.

A good thing, too, as I'm going to have a lot of snow to shovel. It's been snowing hard all night, and we must have close to five inches on the ground already, with more to come. This is our first real non-sleety-rainy snow event of the year, and I am excited to see it. In the pale first daylight, the neighborhood is draped with a Currier and Ives cuteness: every house enacts a New England vignette--snug and snowbound, lamp-lit windows casting a cozy glow onto the sweep of white. Really, the view is ridiculously sentimental . . . not that I don't appreciate it. Soon snowplows and road salt will scrape the picture into a regular old 21-first-century setpiece, so It's been pleasant to pretend that sleighs, not Ford F250s, will be jingling up the street. Of course, it's also easy to forget the filth created by a city of horses. Every era wallows in its quotidian ugliness, and ours does not involve trudging to school through steaming piles of horseshit.

In a minute I'll be out in the snow myself, dragging recycling bins and compost pails, and the romance will fade. Still, some version of beauty will last . . . if nothing else, the gorgeous shimmer of snow-light through the house windows.

Today I'll undertake my exercise class, I'll work on Frost Place stuff, I'll meet with a faculty member to confab about the teaching conference, I'll go through my notebook and think about some of the drafts I wrote with the kids on Wednesday, I'll ponder the poems of Robert Southwell, I'll text with my children, I'll bake bread, I'll wash sheets, and eventually I'll shovel the driveway and the sidewalk. For dinner, braised lamb, roasted potatoes, a tomato and fennel salad, vanilla pudding.

A fire in the wood stove. A book in my lap.