I said to myself the other day while shoveling another eight to ten inches of cold white fluff mixed with nasty brown snowplowed ice, "Tell me again why you're living here." And then today, I looked up at the dark green spruce in our back yard, its limbs bowed with immense white clouds of snow that looked so delicious, I had to take a bite.

I ducked beneath the branches to follow the path to the back fence. The field beyond is full of hardwoods, bare now of leaves, but with every twig and branch covered and outlined with snow. Coming back to the house, I looked up at the azure sky laced with just a few white puffs and ripples.

There can be no more beautiful sight, I thought, than that snow-covered tree against that blue-blue sky. And I said out loud: "This is why I live in the Northeast." The untouched snow on the ground sparkled like a bazillion-gazillion diamonds. I walked around it to avoid messing it up with my footprints and laughed, thinking of summer grass to mow.