Brittle browned pages. A mystery published in 1944. The glue holding the leaves together and attaching the paperboard cover has dried hard and fragile. The book can only be opened about 45 degrees, lest it split, crack and come to pieces. But the black-ink letters form a story unchanged from a lifetime ago. The characters live. Though most would have been older than my parents (still young during the war) they all breathe, speak, embrace… and three die horribly. It is late at night. Only a few pages remain. There is an urgency to finish the story that has lain dormant for over 80 years. The young couple, the old enormous sage, the brusque detective… all live again this cold, black, wet winter night. I have joined them these last few nights. A silent observer separated by fourscore and two years. I join them in their cottages, on the village streets, across the fields and through the coppice. When I get to the final page, I bend it carefully lest the dry-toned paper crack. The book ends. They continued their lives. I will continue mine. I set the mystery aside—solved. It was good to meet and get to know these long-dead characters. Now the light can be waved off. The blankets pulled up to my chin. A cocoon of warmth surrounded by a chilly late-night house whose fire has died down to ash and coals. Then sleep will come. Other stories, dreams, will come. I will meet and know people. Perhaps strangers. Perhaps familiar.

The rain and warmth of the recent days have melted all but the biggest snow piles. My gardens and walls have reappeared.

All the water from the sky will boost the flowers and ferns waiting underground. Some signal will trigger their rise toward the sun.

It is Friday. The teakettle is screaming. I will try a new variety of tea formulated by the French firm Mariage Freres. “English Breakfast Tea—Strong and malty notorious morning.” “Notorious”? Something may be lost in translation. The tea comes in “traditional French cotton muslin tea sachets.”

It makes me feel special.

When I got home yesterday, I was finally able to fill the suet cages suspended from a chain strung between trees. No way I’d venture onto the ice with my bum leg. The snow melt and rain have made the heavily mulched garden springy to walk upon.

Yesterday, I had the first physical therapy on my hamstring injury. My doctor told me it would speed healing. The therapist had me do some stretches. She gave the back of my thigh a cocoa-butter massage. That felt so good. Then a couple of electrode patches were stuck on me, and I was gently zapped under ice for ten minutes.

The injury has improved immensely. I can bend to the floor without wincing. Sitting doesn’t set my teeth to gritting. But after standing 6 hours or so, the thigh does swell and ache.

The tree people returned and pruned along the driveway.

The overhanging branches prevented the sun from hitting the pavement. That makes a difference when there is ice.

I had two big trees dropped that had grown higher than the barn. They would cause moisture to linger on the structure and threatened to crush the barn. They were leaning that way.

I will have a lot of firewood to bring in. By next winter, it will be seasoned—dry enough to burn. There is a lot of wood to pick up and carry and load onto the truck. That will be good work. I need the exercise.

The tea is delicious. I don’t detect any notorious undertones. Perhaps my palate is too dull for such a sensitive sensation.

The week has been strange. The sudden shift from brutal single-digit temperatures and the seemingly permanent marble-like thick ice layer to days warm enough to wear only a sweatshirt and the appearance of sodden fields and lawns.

Spaces continue to open up in the warehouse, but if tradition bears true, the flood of spring incoming collections will fill the building up again to overflow.

Spring is just a month away. I bought the first seed packets.

I hope I find the time and inspiration to actually plant them.

Annika has been loosed on the signed Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje collection.

I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for. Of course, she has plenty of other books to work on.

All those yellow tubs are filled with books thought worthy enough to merit her attention.

Somehow we allowed five pallets of a hopeless self-published inspirational book to be dumped on us.

It will be expensive in labor for us to recycle them. It is a lot of work to dump the books from all those boxes into Gaylords. At least pulping is still “free.” Scrap paper used to have positive cash value.

I went to two doctors this week. It wasn’t depressing. The numbers are the best they’ve been in a few years. Should I be worried?

This stunning 18th-century “Shakspeare” arrived from my friends at Carpe Diem.

I’m a sucker for Shakespeare, Tolkien, Milton… I guess I’m a sucker for books.

Maybe it is the weather. Maybe my mending leg. Work has been more fun this week.

I made an offer on a building for a new bookstore. Very early days, but that would be exciting. I need something to keep me busy.

And my amaryllis forest is anxious for spring too.

I ordered too many to give away at Christmas. Things were dreary then, so I delayed potting them. Now they will be mine, Mine, MINE.

Winter has broken. I hope for good. I’ve frequently commented that living up here is pretty easy for about 362 days a year. Ice, snow, nature only smack me in the face a few days a year.

2026 has exhausted that quota by a factor of ten.

It is Sunday, the 15th.

The fire dances merrily in the woodstove. The dawn is a reddish band on the horizon.

I can’t think of a way to describe that shade of red. So much for being a writer.

But perhaps, as with books, my talent lies in volume. This story is week #449 since July 2017. Not a single Friday has gone by without some post here.

Today will be a vacation day for me. I will be at work, but I will be alone. Not exactly alone. My Muse and three dogs will be with me. There will be five million books surrounding me as well. Maybe slightly fewer than that. The huge purchases we have had in the last few months have put a dent in the totals. The brutal weather slows the incoming collections as well. The single-digit temperatures slow the molecules all around us. It also slows the flow of books in.

I have been on a mission to get into some of the aging, dusty, plastic-wrapped pallets that are everywhere in the building. Some go back a couple of decades. Some are personal. Family stuff from a couple of moves and the sale of the stone Civil War farmhouse south of Gettysburg, close to the Mason-Dixon Line. That was in 2000.

Hoarding. In my case, the gene has been key to my livelihood and the preservation of millions of books. I am a Professional Hoarder. Perhaps that should be my job title when the government asks what I do for a living.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. The temperature rose to 55. The dogs were lolling against the south-facing wall in the fenced dockyard. The sun was bright. Its rays beating down on the white wall made that microclimate even warmer.

“Ahhhh…”

I was the only manager in. There were six other employees in. So, I needed to pay attention to their work as well as my own.

I got in at 9. There were 6 cars in the parking lot. Their occupants were waiting for me to unlock the front door.

My leg is getting better. The long stints in bed with my leg raised on a pillow have helped. When I awake from the long sleeps I have been blessed with lately, my body actually feels pretty normal when I rise. But soon there is that ache. The muscles and tendons in my left thigh rebel at activity. Sitting is still an acute pain in the a##.

Carts… All day long, I reviewed cartloads of old books. Winnowing the wheat from the chaff.

As the hours of standing passed, I felt my leg swelling. The pain swelled as well. I watched the big round white-faced clock’s hands movement. At 4:30, the employees would leave, and then so could I. My leg began screaming.

“Lie down, you maniac. Put some ice on me. I’m threatening you. I can make it worse!”

4:30 came. I followed the people to the front door and locked it behind them.

Sunday

It rained all night and day.

It chased the ice and snow away.

Sunday was chilly but not freezing. The rains came in midafternoon. Patches of earth and grass appeared. The brutal hard marble-like ice from frosting that lasted three weeks was being defeated, returned to liquid water.

As the snow retreated, it dropped weeks of debris behind.

In Pennsylvania, there is a vast field of boulders left behind by a glacier’s retreat thousands of years ago.

The debris around the warehouse was mostly organic material dropped or blown in. Snowplows also pushed leaves, sticks, tufts of grass and other stuff—like trash and litter—into the perimeters and piles as they cleared roads and parking lots.

Up on the mountain there are tens of thousands of sunflower seed husks on the porch roof and the ground and porch below it.

Ugly gray mushy ash is puddling where I had to dump it, as the ash can was ice-bound and out of reach. It couldn’t be dumped on the gardens either. Snow piles turned to marble-like ice that made the gardens unreachable. I’ll have to shovel the ash into the garden beds.

Inside, my home is a debris field as well. Any little thing that got dropped or fell would be left where it lay, as bending all the way to the floor was a painful project reserved only for larger things or bits too important to leave for the dogs to snuffle. The dogs left bits and pieces around as well. I got a dustpan with a long upright handle. I’ll begin sweeping up the household debris.

It is time to pick up the pieces from my sojourn into the world of frigid cold and acute pain.

There’s still a good deal of snow cover on the mountain, but the rock terrace walls are emerging and patches of garden, brown and wet are appearing.

But it is finally over. The next ten days will all be above freezing. That will get us most of the way to March. Then Spring.

My personal trial seems to be improving. The hamstring pull and other injuries incurred while stepping on a round dog toy in the dark and sliding on a polished wooden floor on stockinged feet before going airborne and hyper-extending my left leg before crashing down is much less painful.

I’ve spent many, many hours in bed with my left leg atop ice atop a couple of pillows. That rest seems to have helped. It still hurts to sit. And reaching to pull on my left sock is still a bit of an acrobatic endeavor.

So it goes.

It was a lovely lonely day in the book warehouse. I face far more carts of books than I could possibly process, but I set to it.

One

At

A

Time.

My older son visited with his two babies after their visit to the Baltimore Aquarium. The younger one, just over one year old, still cries at the sight of me. The older boy was born 30 months ago. He enjoyed the spectacle of all the books. I gave him a collection of Goodnight Moon books in a carrying case. He liked that. He paraded, carrying the box like a briefcase. Then he wanted me to read one to him.

“Read this!”

It was Goodnight Moon. He clearly had it memorized and would finish the lines on each page when I paused to prompt him.

“Read anudder!”

He wasn’t familiar with the other Goodnight Moon sequels in the box and demanded that each be read. It was late in the day, and my body was stiff and sore. It ached to bend and read them, but how often do you get a chance like that?

They took off to do some shopping and play at the mall’s indoor playground. We would meet for dinner later.

When the day was done, the place looked like chaos. Carts were strewn everywhere. Each had tags on them indicating where they should go. There were piles of boxes in a number of places where I had worked on something, finished and abandoned that spot to move to another.

The Monday team will make sense of it all, and the place will be better for my efforts.

Monday

I’ll let the fire go out. The furnaces are turned off. The house will retain enough warmth until I get home and start another blaze. The storm brought down lots of branches and twigs, which double as fire starter and yard cleanup.

The old dogs are sleeping on the bed next to me. They relish my touch. Rubbing their stomachs or scratching the napes of their necks, they respond with silent joy at the attention.

Merry and Pip turned 15 last week. Their spirit is undaunted. Their bodies are slowing and failing. Pip is mostly blind and frail but soldiers on. When I let him out, I start calling for him soon after. He might wander off into the forest and be lost forever. He follows the sound of my voice. Usually.

When I got in the early crew had already created order from my chaos. We are pushing to get more books online. The depredations of the mega-customers have reduced the number of books on the shelves. You wouldn’t know it to look at it, but we need to reload the bookcases.

I have a doctor’s appointment this morning. Now that my leg and hip are finally beginning to heal, I’m going. Last week when the appointment was made, I’d had a particularly rough day. I stood too long playing with books, and swelling, aching and acute twinges made me despair. Sometimes I think just making a doctor’s appointment is curative. So often when I finally get in for an exam, the symptoms have ebbed or disappeared.

It went pretty well. He suggested physical therapy.

“You’ll get better faster.”

He is so cool. His explanations calm, understandable and thorough. I’m lucky.

Back to work, I made a short day of it. It was President’s Day. And I was theoretically on vacation in Switzerland anyway.

We decided where the remaining 76 light fixtures would be placed in the vast warehouse.

I planned to do office work on my back in bed when I got home, but by midafternoon I was tired—likely from yesterday’s exertions.

I texted some images of more tree work to the arborist/estimator. Looking down the steep drive (a.k.a. The Ski Jump), I saw that so many of the trees had spread over it. This keeps the sun off the asphalt longer, and so ice or snow is slower to melt.

There’s a lot of cleanup inside now I can bend somewhat to sweep and pick up floor debris. I did a little of that before I indulged in watching a few old episodes of Cheers. “Comfort Fare.”

Then I was worthless.

Leftovers were heated. I climbed into bed with two ice packs and read.

Now it is Tuesday.

It is cold and foggy. I can’t see beyond 50 yards from the house. The day will rise to 55 degrees. Giles can go out in the pen for the day.

I’m going to look at a potential new store. Is that crazy?

The snow cover keeps retreating. The terrace walls and stone paths are appearing first.

So, the arctic sojourn here is done.

What’s next?

Hagerstown is.

Ernest is driving us. It is chilly and damp. The day can’t warm up too soon for me.

2026 has been a year of cold and pain so far.

But an old friend from Boston tells me this year is supposed to be very special; it’s a FIRE HORSE year. She was born the same year.

“Supposedly spectacular things are in store for us. Just giving you a head’s up so you won’t be too surprised when you win Powerball, get named Bookseller of the Year and get your blog published.”

I can’t wait for the Chinese New Year to begin.

We are crossing under the Appalachian Trail and then down into the next broad valley.

Sitting only hurts a bit.

I haven’t been to the Hagerstown Wonder Book in a few months. Various reasons. My son oversees it, and so there’s not a lot for me to do. Plus, we have a good staff there. That’s key. When the staff is problematic, upper management is required to show up more often.

Sigh… Hagerstown has always been a problem child. It was opened in 1995.

It has been through some rough times. Landlords, wacky employees, crazy customers, panhandlers, junkies and worse. It was set afire not that long ago.

The current landlord finally got serious and hired armed security guards. That’s made a difference. Deterrence is a real thing.

Another week.

The first day of spring is a month away.

Then…

It is all going too fast.