The sun was stingy this month; the snow was not. February in the North country is not for the faint-hearted.

Everything that can fall out of the skies has…rain, freezing rain, snow and fog. When the sky wasn’t falling, the temperatures were plunging.

Our down-slanting driveway has turned into a gigantic ice skating rink. We now take the car to our mailbox at the top of the drive.

On the other side of the house, huge ice shelves have built up along the lake shore. On warm days (warm defined as 35 degrees) big chunks of ice break off and float like islands. It resembles a scene from the Arctic minus a polar bear on one of the ice floes.

This challenging weather has given everyone on the Tooley estate ravenous appetites. We are feeding hundreds of hungry mouths each day in the outdoor cafe. Fifty birds feeding simultaneously is a common sight now. Our most comical daytime visitors are thirteen turkeys who strut in from the woods. One prefers to dine on top of the corn table. Groups of deer slip silently under the feeders at night to second harvest all the fallen seeds and corn.

Inside the house, we are indulging in comfort foods. I am drawn like a magnet to the kitchen where I am cooking up large quantities of hearty soups, au gratin potatoes, pasta dishes, cornbread and cookies.

The cats have turned into chow hounds as well. They sit and wait beside their food dishes for kibble to arrive. The smarter felines open the lower cupboard doors where they know their food is stored. We’ve cat proofed the lids of the bins.

This week the first sign of spring appeared….at our grocery store. The new crop of Florida strawberries has come in, a true cause for celebration. These luscious berries signal that spring has arrived somewhere in the United States, if not in our backyard. I bought three quarts.

Liz was a smashing redhead.

“I’ve got great hair,” she would say. She did. It was thick, stylish and a flaming match to her original color.

Liz was eighty years old, widowed after a happy marriage. She was also a friend and neighbor of my mother-in-law. These two women couldn’t have been more opposite. My mother-in-law was not into glamour, nights out or romance. Liz, on the other hand, lived to get all dolled up, go out dancing and meet gentlemen. She meet quite a few and took many home to her doublewide.

One day my mother-in-law informed us that Liz was getting married; she had found the perfect golden-ager to move into her trailer on a permanent basis. The wedding was to be on the east coast where Liz’s daughter lived. Elaborate nuptial plans were made. Liz and her fiance left Arizona in a flurry of well wishes.

The next time we visited Arizona, we saw Liz, her new husband and all their beautiful wedding photographs. The “cutting the cake” picture was particularly lovely.

Years passed. The 80 plus year old bride died and my mother-in-law’s health started to fail.Then my husband’s mother said she needed to tell us something extremely serious. We panicked.

“Do you remember Liz?” she asked us.

“Of course, she was terrific,” we replied.

“Well, she revealed,” Liz never really got married. She thought everything would be better if she faked a wedding.”

What brilliant creativity. This exuberant eighty year old got to have her cake and eat it, too.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

“We are going to see snow for the very first time!” the little boy said. “We are from India.”

He and his brother were standing behind us in the jetway. We were all in Los Angeles waiting to board a plane to Detroit. The temperature in L.A. was 73 degrees; Detroit was reporting 14 degrees.

“I think you will see snow today,”  I assured them. “Snow is in Detroit’s weather forecast.”

The man ahead of us chimed in. “You’ll get sick of it in an hour.”

Curmudgeons should be ignored, so I asked the boys if they were planning on building a snowman.

“We don’t know how!” they said in unison.

“It’s easy,” I told them as I pantomimed scooping up the snow, packing the snowball and rolling it around.

I also told them about our son’s best snowman who was over five feet tall and built on our deck two inches away from the huge ceiling to floor dining room windows. Snowman’s jolly face looked in at us and he practically became a member of the family until the spring thaw.

Despite the fact that I’m a freezy cat, all around winter wimp and frequent driver on snow packed roads, I hope never to lose my appreciation of a snowfall’s beauty. How fortunate we all are that children remind us of the world’s wonders.

The idea is brilliant in its simplicity. About five years ago, I read about a gentleman from the 1800’s who recorded a one or two sentence observation from nature each day. He faithfully made his notations for decades. I immediately wanted to do the same.

My husband and I moved to the country 17 years ago to slow down our lives. I was born and raised in a big city: I will always love the diversity, excitement, art and architecture a large city offers. But the noise and pace of city life can drown out the subtleties of nature. We have chosen to make city visits the exclamation points in our quieter, country life.

I now have recorded five years of daily events. These notes are the opposite of keeping a diary. A diary is about the “me”….what I am doing or what someone is doing to me. In my nature log, I am merely an observer to the daily wonders.

Some sample entries:

July 3, 2008 – Crow walking and tapping on the skylights at dawn…a big racket!

April 29, 2009 – Marsh marigolds starting to bloom, the gnats return.

June 2, 2010 – Mom raccoon brings her 6 new babies to The Tooley Cafe.

March 10, 2011 – The goldfinches are turning yellow.

October 3, 2012 – A coyote is out at noon looking for lunch in the newly cut field across the road. He trots off into the corn.

January 18, 2013 – A vivid magenta and pink sunset is reflected in the eastern sky.

Thich Naht Hanh would call this exercise mindfulness and scientists would call it observation. To me, it is taking notice.

“Lady, don’t drive anywhere without a mechanic in the trunk.”

This advice from Click and Clack to a caller on their Car Talk program now applies to me. I can no longer  drive my husband’s car if he or the mechanic in the trunk aren’t present.

We both love our 1990 blue Miata convertible: it is still shiny, rust free and undinged. But the other day I was rushing to the Post Office and took off in the Miata, the last car in the driveway. I panicked on the freeway when I realized I hadn’t checked the tires. A prerequisite to driving the car is to check the tires and inflate them when necessary with a can of tire-be-fixed with glue additives.

Trips to the car wash are also problematic. On the last visit, my husband handed me a stack of bath towels as he drove into the bay and said, “You will need these”. Water was soon spurting into the car from multiple leaks in the convertible top. On the bright side, we had bought the exterior wash and were getting the interior done as well.

The noises are another problem. This geriatric vehicle can make some scary sounds. I cannot discriminate between an “your entire engine is falling out” sound and a “that’s nothing to worry about’ sound”. Guys have an advantage in this department.

The lack of shock absorbers doesn’t bother me, you can’t have everything, right? The frequent lack of a side mount mirror is another matter. When your car is the size of a pea, it is beneficial to know what’s in your immediate territory.

My husband recently told me he’s decided to buy his 23 year old car a new set of tires. I’m O.K.with this purchase.  I just think of Cuba. The guys down there keep cars going for 50 or 60 years.

Wish us luck.