So here I am, up and about. Yesterday I tried actually to stay put in bed, and I managed to do so most of the time. Today I have made it as far as the livingroom bigsoftchair.

But soon I must shower the film of illness off my skin and out of my hair and dress myself in layers of black turtlenecks and heavy denim and make my way to the Bookworm to try to catch things up there. The LibraryFriends have sold a book and I must track it down in their storage and ship it. The sweet developmentally challenged couple who volunteer for the Thursday four-hour shift in the Buck-a-bag Book Trailer start work at noon and usually need some reassuring.

And I'm sure there's sorting to do.

Yes, I'm still coughing a little, still filling great bandana-handkerchiefs with nasal effluvia, but I can't stay in bed forever.

So here I go. In a minute.

The world out there for several days has alternated moments of sun with longer moments of gray and snow - dry graupel snowpellets that sublime quickly into the cold-desert arid air. We had some pleasant windbluster and naked trees tossing and bending. Soon it will be too late, too warm, to gather balsam poplar buds for salve-making. It may be too late already. I'm sure the balsam is thick and heavy on the buds this year, because this past January gave us so many weeks of below-zero temps.

But I don't even know where to find balsam poplars on this side of the Warners, here on the plateau. I had a whole forest of them around my little house on Little Dream Farm, but that was long ago, in the SurpriseValley over the mountains 30 miles from here. When I bought this little house, I bought two saplings to plant in my back yard, from the ForestFarm catalog. But hungry towndeer persistently gobble them to the ground. So.

I have 20 minutes now to pull myself together. OK then. Nice visiting with you.