Each winter my late husband used to look out at the snow falling so relentlessly and say, “It’s one day nearer to spring.” With the cold and messy storms we’ve been having, I need to remind myself of that fact every day.

When we lived in Monroe, our good friend and neighbor, Bud Fisher, was a chemist. One year, close to Christmas he decided to treat a supply of pine cones with chemicals that would be harmless but pretty, when put on the fireplace logs.

We rounded up several containers and Bud provided the chemicals. Each color required a different kind of a chemical and they were each used in one quart of water. The colors were: green, a quart of boric acid; red, one quarter pound of strontium nitrite; blue, one quarter pound of copper sulfate; and yellow, one quarter pound of table salt. Purple – my favorite, required one quarter pound of potassium permanganate.

We soaked the cones in the solution, then dried them thoroughly on newspapers for a couple of days. The women made little bags from some netting and tied them with big red bows. They were fun to use during the holiday season, as we sat by the fireplace. The blue colored ones were the best.

When I wrote about the new books that came my way at Christmas time, I didn’t have space enough to mention Ortho’s Guide To The Birds Around Us. Outstanding writers from all over the country combine their talents to cover all aspects of the bird world. This is a large book with colored illustrations on every page. It is a great book to keep on the coffee table and to pick up and leaf through in a spare half hour. I think it is especially appealing to children and it covers all the questions they are apt to ask, with simple answers.

My neighbor across the hall brought over her Christmas gift book, Outwitting Squirrels. The author, Bill Adler, Jr, notes in the introductory page, the second edition is revised and even craftier, it promises “Cunning Stratagems to Reduce Dramatically the Egregious Misappropriation of Seed from Your Birdfeeder by Squirrels.”

If you don’t laugh often as you read this book, you are without a sense of humor. Don’t mistake that remark, though, for there is a great amount of material in these pages to think about, consider, and perhaps act upon.

From these new bird stories I have learned that the mockingbirds are very territorial. The one I have enjoyed watching all winter has come regularly every day, at just after eight in the morning. It is back to drink as often as six times that I know of each day, and seems to be around the cardinals whenever they are here. It doesn’t eat at the feeders, but sometimes eats underneath the old spruce tree.

Today is Scott’s birthday – he is the oldest grandson. When my own children have birthdays, I have trouble believing the number of years as I sign a birthday card. But when the grandchildren begin to pass age 30 or more, I wince.

The day Scott was born I got in the car and headed to Bridgeport to the hospital to inspect this first arrival of a new generation. I was mindless. I went right through a red light as I neared the Merritt Parkway in Long Hill, and wondered why several other motorists were madly blowing their horns at me!

Last week the lines of poetry were by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from The Wreck of the Hesperus.

Who said, “Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”?