Spring is four hours away. Maybe it is really over this time. No more surprises like last Monday?

Battered by winter’s blows
Ice, wind, cold rain and snow
I see spring on the horizon
The sun is moving northward
It is pulling southern warmth behind it
Summer is still far behind
There may be a couple frigid strikes yet
But there begins on this date and time
The true sweet new year
Buds will swell, leaves unfurl
Green will fill the forest
Birdsong will be joyful and fecund
Warming fires die to cold ash
Soon they will be needed no longer
Bone-chilling memories will fade
When warm sun kisses my face

I am ready to be warm again, to take the boots and gloves and knit caps down fourteen wooden steps to the cedar closet. Press seeds into the earth. Gently lift transplants and place them where some new colony will grow.

The official time of the equinox is 10:46 a.m. today, Friday, March 20th.

Aah…

But this morning is cold. 38. There’s a big log in the woodstove burning slowly. It will smolder all day with the dampers closed. When I get home, the house will be warm. The gardens will be in the 60s. I will walk through them all. First, I will note the damage from the winds and ice of Monday’s blast. But then I will note the ranks of the next wave of flowers pushing up from their dormancy beneath the ground.

Soldier on! Fill each patch of bare earth with the green life that has been sleeping beneath it.

It has been yet another momentous frantic week.

My leg continues to improve. The physical therapist was kneading my thigh like bread dough at 7 a.m. yesterday. It felt so good, but the rest of the day my thigh ached in protest.

The orders keep pouring in. We now have revived the dry-erase board to use as a kind of spreadsheet so no orders go awry.

I’ve ordered a couple hundred more Gaylords so we don’t run low.

I just ordered another 270! Those are huge stacks.

We will begin a massive category pull at the three stores on Monday. Will the customers notice 60,000 books suddenly missing? I don’t think so. We used to have European booksellers visit and buy ALL the history and all the military and all the literary authors popular in their countries and all the…

“Just don’t include the mass-market paperbacks or pamphlets.”

The shelves would look a little bare, but soon they’d fill in like holes dug by children on the beach when the tide waves in.

I met with the specialist. My last contact with the office was in November. I wore a monitor for a week or two. When I turned it in, I met with the nurse practitioner. A brief review. I was told I’d be called with the rest of the results. A couple of hours later, I was called. By then, it was late Friday afternoon. I was alone in the warehouse. Everyone else had left.

The conversation was a worried one. Bad numbers. “Your heart might wear out.” Raise dosages. Do this. Don’t do that. Did I hear my body was out of sync 7% of the time? Almost two hours a day. And I rarely felt anything was awry.

I went home in despair.

“One year? Three? …”

Then it was the holidays. Family problems. Busy times. CRAZY busy times. Sick old dogs—my closest friends. Then the most brutal winter. Then the injury, and I couldn’t bend or sit for a month. Then…

I told the doctor about my concerns about the numbers.

!?!?

“No. It was actually less than 1%… Things actually look pretty good.”

I’m not dying by inches after all?

I stepped outside the office door—automatic so the frail don’t have to push—stepped into the sun with new eyes. The sword of Damocles, suspended just above and behind my neck, disappeared.

More huge orders.

“Hire 5 or 6 more order pullers.”

At home, it was a week of hauling in wood and splitting it. I brought up seven truckloads, backed to the barn door and tossed logs out onto the gravel floor. The heaviest ones, I rolled off the end of the tailgate.

I needed to make more room for more wood.

Split and stack.

The loop of steel wire, the choke, was pulled out. The red dial twisted to “Run.” A few yanks on the cord, and the machine spluttered to life, its pulse irregular. When the choke was pushed, the big machine roared to life in rhythm—like a healthy heart.

I lifted a big log onto the cradle with a little grunt. The lever was pushed forward, and the shiny hydraulic rod with the cast iron wedge at its end slid forward.

You see what happened next.

The last day of winter, and I spent an hour before dinner splitting and tossing wood.

Pip’s blindness is advancing. When I call, he will often go in the wrong direction or bump into things. One dark night, I heard “thump, thump, thump, thump…”

He’d fallen down the steps, fourteen of them, all bare hardwood, and landed on the hard wooden floor at the bottom. I hopped out of bed and rushed down. I expected to find him broken or worse, but he was just walking around the downstairs foyer randomly.

“You poor trooper.”

I carried my friend upstairs and put him on the bed. Now the steps are blocked so my little hero doesn’t go awry again in his permanent darkness.

It was a rough weekend. But I soldiered through a lot of carts. A lot!

“He died of a surfeit of books.”

We are driving down to Gaithersburg on yet another Monday. Me and Ernest in one van. Bryan in another. My plan is to force some of the projects that have been left on the back burner. All three of us are fast and will devote some hours to uninterrupted moving and pricing.

The temperature will rise to 68. Then high winds and storms and possible tornadoes will come this afternoon.

If we survive and are not blown off this planet, we will enjoy a high of 37 tomorrow. A 31-degree difference.

I need to figure a way to get more shelves filled in Gaithersburg. It is a great staff there, but they struggle with all the new customers and moving projects. I think the moves are finished now. I have often opined on how much work we could get done if only the customers were out of the way. Maybe we could put in some graveyard shifts and work uninterrupted.

We got a lot done. I even stickered a few boxes of sci fi and horror myself. The end of the paperback lit alphabet was moved to give it a little more space. We will do the massive relocation of DVDs soon. Crafts was moved across the building so it will be next to art and art how-to.

And now we are driving back. Bryan will follow later when he wraps up some loose ends. Ernest pulled a couple thousand books for Books by the Foot subject orders.

And I’m just so tired. Dreading the next doomsday visit to the cardiologist tomorrow. It can’t be good news…

We are heading home into the storm.

“The DC Region is bracing for a walloping… Even Congress is not voting…”

(Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.)

The three of us got a lot of things done in a couple of hours.

“You gotta break eggs to make an omelet.”

While we were driving back, I finalized a deal on about 60,000 books from the stores. The list of subjects wanted is pretty interesting.

All 116 of them. (Apparently, our store directory lists 155 book categories? I should know this!)

Incredible. The last five months or so have been out of scale, and things are heading in even crazier directions.

It has become so big and I’m so little.

The rain is pelting the van, and traffic on the interstate is stopping and starting for no reason I can tell.

I did what I had to and headed home.

Looking out the bay window, I saw the dusk blowing across the valley, black and gray. Churning clouds tossed low toward the earth. I watched it darken and wondered will it spin into a tornados and knock the forest down about me. The winds roar low, nearly growling. This storm is a beast. Rain cascades through the outdoor security lights that come on with the storm’s motion. There is nothing to do but sit it out and hope that the walls can withstand the buffeting, that the roof can stay secured to the walls, that the walls can hold to the foundation.

There is no place to go but to bed. There, there is warmth and succor. One lone little light amongst all the torrents and raging in the tossing darkness outside.

How long will this go on? Hours is the prediction. One hundred percent rain and winds until it blows itself away. It must give way as surely as the sun will rise hours from now. And what will the dawn reveal? Branches stripped, trees toppled, roads washed out, the landscape changed.

Helpless, I retreat to the succor of cotton and wool and bundled feathers.

“Whomp!”—a gust of wind hits the house. The phone reports that winds around here will peak at 75 mph.

The worried dogs press on to me, believing I must know what to do.

What have we done to merit this judgment?

The winds answer from the north, the west, the south and east!

“No man caused this. No man can withstand this. Nothing can stop this. Know that this could be your doom.”

And be afraid.

I switched off the last light and hoped to sleep the storm away. The blackness only magnified the roaring, whooshing, splattering.

The temperature dropped. Rain became sleet. The power failed around 9. Neighbors texted the lights will not come back til tomorrow.

The woodstove is the only light in the house. All the little litter lights have gone dark. The clock on the stove. The alarm lights. The two blue squares on the toaster…

Outside, I can see the earth has turned white yet again. The valley is dark for several miles to the east. Further eastward toward the horizon, the world must be on a different grid. Those distant lights flicker with all the rains cascading in between.

I summon the dogs to go out. Ice covers the porch floor all the way to the door. I step out gingerly and hear “CRAAAACK!” And a tree crashes not far away, but not on the barn, thank God.

Six hours ago it was nearly 70. Now it is in the 20s.

The power came back on after 2:30. I know this because the lamp on the nightstand came on and awakened me.

I slept fitfully. But the fire was a good one, and the house was in the high 60s.

Before dawn, the neighbors’ texts started coming in. Some trees were down across the road between me and the county road. They’ll take care of it. I’ve seen enough wood.

When I got home last evening, I brought up load number 6 this week. That was before all hell broke loose.

Dawn illuminated a beautiful snowscape. The sunrise enhanced that.

I’ll head down before long.

When the sun came up, I saw the world outside was coated in ice and snow. I could tell that most of the first wave of daffodils had their sunny faces pushed down onto the ground. I felt as crushed as they did. Would any of them pop back up when the ice melts?

No. A large percentage of the first daffodils were left bent and broken when the ice and snow melted. The landscape was blown as if a battle had been waged.

And now it is Friday. The first day of spring. The first sunrise of spring is rising behind the little forest of amaryllis. I moved them all to the bay window so I can enjoy their giant over-the-top blossoms.

I look to the east with new eyes. I’ve gotten a reprieve.

The Egypt trip was replaced with France. I’m anxious to walk around Paris again. Escargot. Stinky cheese. Steak frites. Crepes with hazelnut butter. Pate Maison… Then out to Normandy. Down to the Loire.

Then books.

Then London.

Then books.

Then…

Then books.

All about me is debris.

The ground outside littered with winter’s droppings. Monday’s huge storm added thousands of branches and twigs.

Inside, my home is littered with bachelor droppings of clothes and books and stuff brought home and set down to be put away later. The floor has the detritus of dog hair and firewood bits and stuff the dogs tracked in.

The house has not recovered from the month that I could not bend.

My housekeeper left last November and, despite a number of dates agreed to, has never returned. I liked her and considered her a friend. I wonder what happened?

So many books rescued.

We will have shipped a quarter of a million books in March by the time it’s over.

Two truckloads go out today.

Some sweet treasures dropped in.

Poe. A dream come true.

I’m renovating my office soon. I’ll remove the short glass cases and line the walls with floor to ceiling cherry.

Then everything can come off the floor.

Then…