They are together again, Ori and Little Sister. Never before has this house been utterly silent. Never before has this house been virtually empty except for Lisa who misses her friend almost as much as I do.

Mother Nature has pulled some not-so-nice tricks this spring and the one she came up with this past week convinced me that indeed the whole world, including some of its furry creatures, had gone mad.

Actually, it was Shakespeare who made the decision whether or not I would ride a borrowed horse on my 85th birthday.

Twenty years ago on April 4, I awakened to a white glare outside the bedroom window, realized the glare was from snow, laughed aloud, burrowed back beneath the covers, and snoozed for another 30 minutes.

If there is a whopping blizzard on the Thursday this article appears, it is all my fault, because this Thursday (March 22) I unplugged the heat tape in the barn.

March is certainly being March, at least in my area, where there is great bluster with huffing and puffing and white-outs one minute, benign sunshine the next.

Yes, coaxed forsythia, brought in perhaps 10 days ago, blooms on the kitchen table, brightening however gray the morning and hinting that hopefully King Winter and his minions are retreating.

Bob Barker, longtime host of the television game program, The Price is Right, might be interested to know he has a really, really big fan in Berlin Center by the name of Harry.

This is not the column I intended to write today. This column should be titled, For Women Only. There are so many “to dos” on my list of columns to write, but an abrupt change in my life has put them on hold for another time.

It just doesn’t seem possible that so much water could fall from the sky, day after day after day. But it does.