Up at 5. Zeke zips outside and into the woods seemingly oblivious to the weather. 7°. A heat wave compared to yesterday. I leave the sliding glass door open a few seconds longer and look skyward...maybe an aurora, maybe just the light of town playing over low flying clouds?

We really ought to walk into work but we don't. A breakdown in the human component. I'm a wimp. Too dark, too cold, to crunchy...I've got excuses waiting in standby should these need replacement.

Driving down the road and there are stars overhead. Snowflakes too. A skychotomy. Town snowplows scraped noisily by an hour ago, pushing snow aside to leave large salt granules and mottled melt spots in their wake.

They say the snow never melts in Wyoming, either blown away to Nebraska or simply worn out by the wind. New Englanders don't have that kind of patience. Horsepower and chemicals fight to ensure Massachusetts drivers needn't slow on the journey to north country slopes. We pull SUVs out of snowy ditches and ignore the strange, hyper-kinetic accent chastising us for having ice.

Somewhere under the scant covering of snow and ice our backyard pond fish are drifting in slow motion thought. Seven of them are NH winter veterans. What about the babies? Twenty or thirty fry ranging from anchovy to pan size. Some of them so dinky they look unfit to weather clouds covering the sun much less three months locked in ice.

Perhaps they are quietly observing the slumbering frogs. Stoked up on glucose, their cells a jello cocktail of sugary anti-freeze, the frogs long ago jammed torpid bodies into rocky crevices and turned winter over to the fates.