I wake up at 4AM. No snow, yet.

At 6:30 sharp, I hear 4 siren blasts signaling no school for the young men and women, children of all sorts, in the Newburyport Public School system. And I imagine all over our small New England seacoast city, mothers and fathers either saying, go back to sleep (and hoping everyone sleeps till about noon), or bundling up all and sundry and getting them to day-care, so that they themselves can begin, what weather forecasters forecast as being the commute from hell.

Parents all over the city wondering to themselves, in a cabin-fever winter, how to get through yet another Newburyport snow day. Children all over Newburyport, MA marveling in delight at yet another opportunity not to go to school, again, not realizing that in the joy of springtime, all those days will, of course, be added on to the Newburyport school calendar. But that reality is way, way in the future, a whole new far off season.

I look out the window and only tiny snow-flakes are falling, accumulation is therefore light. Not until later in the day when the temperature rises will Newburyport, New England be blessed with big fat snow flakes falling and accumulating rapidly. And then I gather we will be blessed by all that snow being soaked with ice and rain, and then dropping temperatures and a frozen white mess.

But for now, a day that promises some good hours of work, before the snow removal thing begins, and the wild dash to remove the fluffy stuff, before the ice and rain starts to fall.

On my walk the other day, I noticed that the light is changing, the way it starts to change in late September, signaling that the days will shortly get shorter. Only this time, it is the reverse.

It gets dark at 5:15 now instead of 4:30, and the sky has that promising pinkish huge at the end of the day.

And I imagine that parents and people all over Newburyport, New England, tell themselves that February is almost here, and that we must surely be on the backside of a long Newburyport, New England winter.