Like in-laws who have overstayed their welcome, winter lingers. While you might be wanting to mop mud from the in-laws’ boots off your kitchen floor, they keep coming and going, anticipating lunch and then dinner.
So, too, winter.
Sunday afternoon, my daughter reads Harry Potter with a cat curled sleeping beside her. I stretch on the rug with the other cat, reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. She pauses to relay a Dumbledore tidbit. I consider sharing the word desertification, and then decide the heck with that. Later, we put on our boots — again, again. In the woods, we follow a narrow snowshoe trail.
I’m likely to lay down the grim reading and pick up Potter as a survival guide, in the current season and for the longer haul….
That epic era once derided as ‘prehistory’ accounts for about 95% of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark.
Stony Soil Vermont 
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” Douglas Adams, in another survival guide.
Okay, that’s good!