Late last week, I was going to write that the back yard is a winter palimpsest, with footprints and pawprints overwritten by successive layers of snow. I was going to write that frolicking in that world was like playing a god striding over plains and rugged mountain ranges alike, where deep alpine tarns lurk to entrap the boots that originally forged them. I was going to write of the delicate Mercator projections etched in the newly fallen powder by the rolling basketball the dog pushes with her faces through the runneled lugeways of the landscape, with spalding imprinted perfectly in reverse.

I was going to write all those things, but then it poured rain over the weekend and warmed up to around 50 before plunging back to single-digit temperatures. The rain caused flooding, and the subsequent temperatures froze everything afterward into the kind of rolling, glassy surface you might expect to find after a nuclear blast site has cooled. Walking is treacherous. And the car at the curb in front of our house demonstrates the danger of parking in a giant standing pool when it's still winter. That car's not moving any time soon.