This week I mailed out a couple of hundred Windham Historical Society newsletters and just about the time I got sat down in the kitchen and was cleaning up my piles of extra sheets, I noticed a glaring typographical error – I had typed a “4” instead of a dollar sign. Now that doesn’t sound too important, except that it was before the figure 25,000 – making it appear that a donation toward the purchase of the Parson Smith house was 425,000, instead of $25,000. I’ve tried to call and contact all who received the newsletter, and corrected others via another mailing – but for those who may not have been notified, this is another attempt to make the correction.

No matter how great technology is, you really can’t depend on the spell-check feature of word processing programs.

It’s funny how a curled up little finger, the one on the left hand, hardly ever used in typing (or as it’s called today, keyboarding), can lose so much strength over the years. It should be muscular by now, since my fingers have been working at this same task for at least 50 years. It could be the arthritis (painless but strength-diminishing). I am grateful I learned to type when I did, on a manual typewriter, with lots of lessons in posture and correct hand position. These old-fashioned lessons have a lot to do with not acquiring carpal tunnel syndrome, which affects many who perform repetitive tasks on keyboards.

Will March go out like a lamb? Although we haven’t had many storms this winter, those we’ve had have sure been dandies. My car sits inside a little snow fort of its own, and waits for me to free it into the sunlight. I, of course, resist doing this for as long as I can, but perhaps by the noontime hour when the sun is at its highest, the old car and I will get free.

In Washington, D.C. pussywillows are selling for $4.99 a bunch of four stems! Around here, these harbingers of spring used to be very common, but widening roads to make way for traffic as a result of development, meant cutting all the bushes and making ditches. This spelled doom for pussywillows and today, unless we want to crawl off into a bog to pick them, we must buy these little spring things.

Friends and relatives who went to warm spots for the winter are anxiously planning to return to Windham and not a moment too soon. I hope they remember where their snow shovels are and the bag of rock salt they thought they’d never need again!

Snow or not, I’m tired of this winter; tired of warming up the car, of listening to retired people with tax-funded government pensions complain about those of us who took advantage of fuel assistance programs and I’m really tired of listening to the body counts from the war zone. I’ve heard it all before, too many times. I want the winter to be over, the war to be over and summer to arrive, bugs and all. If this could happen next week, it would be all right with me.

See you next week.