Our house doesn’t have a back yard — a feature, not a bug, according to us black-thumb types — but the front does border on a beautiful park with a small pond. The park is called “the Mall,” pronounced the English way: rhymes with “pal.” Natives can always ID tourists by their faulty pronunciation. The pond looks man-made, situated right in the center of town as it is, but if my Internet source can be trusted (and, really, how often do you find inaccurate information on the Internet?), it is actually “a kettle hole formed by the melting of a huge fragment of an ancient glacier.”

Such was the scene today, when the sun broke out after a few hours of desultory snow:

The majority of my extended family has moved to Florida, and they love to complain about how cold it is “up North.” (There is an inverse ratio between the length of time the person has lived in the south and the amount of whining they do, viz., the people who just bought a second home there last winter like to pretend that their blood has permanently thinned.) They love to flaunt what they see as their good fortune and superior sense in having moved to a warmer clime by asking us, with disdain, how we can stand even a week of winter without contemplating suicide. To which I say, “Buck up, put on some Polartec, lace up your skates and enjoy the winter, you big wussies.”