I refuse to miss the second day of my 31 days of writing a Blog Post.

Today I’ve been running between the bathrooms, to the laundry room, to the closet near the front door… Okay, that sounds odd. But I have to admit these strange subzero temperatures we have been going through is worrisome.   The pipes need to keep flowing. And any part of the house without heat- the front closet- needs to be warmed up or opened up to allow the flow of warm air. I can’t just leave it open, my cats will get into things they shouldn’t. My Ragdoll has a dangerous taste for plastic.

Which keeps me opening and closing the closet and shooing away the cats. All the while crossing my fingers that when springs comes, that the pipes hold.

At 3 pm I remembered the mail. The mailbox is five hundred feet away from the house. How bad can it be, the sun was shining brightly, puffy snow coated the driveway. I stuffed myself into layers, sweater, sweatshirt, two left-handed gloves, and a scarf. After I pulled on my heavy winter coat I had to search around for my knit hat. By the time I was ready to get the mail, I was ready for a nap.

I opened the garage overhead doors, grabbed a ski pole/walking stick and headed into the amazingly gorgeous day. The first thing I noticed was the lack of birds. Everyone was hiding. What I hadn’t noticed was the wind, at least not until I passed the first evergreen tree. Then the wind slapped me in the face and knocked off my knit hat. I grabbed it off the ground hit it against my puffed up coat, shoved it back on my head and continued to slip-sliding towards the mailbox.

The third thing I noticed was the lack of new animal tracks. Wildlife has more brains than I do- they were hiding in their burrows.

The winds picked up the closer I got to the road.

I opened the mailbox and retrieved a handful of bills just as a gust of wind blew in hard from the west, jerking the letters from my frozen gloved hand, tossing them into the ditch and the under the Pussy willow bush.   For a moment I debated leaving the mail right where it lay because under that bush -with my mail- was over a foot of snow. With my toes starting to hurt, I reached under the bush; the branches grabbed my hat holding onto it like a decoration. Those branches kept my hat off the snow.  I crawled out and retrieved my snowless hat.

The wind pushed me back to the house and into the garage. Tomorrow,  I will take the car to get the mail.