No one is coming up these stairs tonight.

Sigh.

Foiled by winter again.  A blizzard is coming at midnight.  It has been snowing all afternoon, but according to the weathermen that’s just a warm up to the real show that’s heading up the coast.

No Sarge.  He had to work.  I was sad.  And so was Sarge.

We just returned from taking my mother to a Hampton Inn 20 miles away.  We take no chances when it comes to her losing her electricity and getting stuck in her hilltop house with no heat in sub-zero temperatures.

Our propane-heated basement isn’t exactly the perfect solution.  I think Florida is.

Monday morning the wind chill temperature could be -22.

Every hotel room closer to us was booked solid.  Between the storm and a URI swim meet and a huge hockey tournament, there wasn’t a room to be had.  We got the last one at the Hampton Inn way north of us.

NancyK and Mike are staying home, safe and warm, after long days at work.

Banjo Man and I drove the back roads home, with snow falling on a beautiful New England landscape: old houses and barns, fields, white churches, historic buildings tucked behind stone walls…

Lovely.

After we left Mom at the hotel, Banjo Man offered pork fried dumplings instead of a Valentine’s card.

I say yes!!!

We watched the snow fall outside of the Dragon Palace and wondered how long it would take us to drive back to the house.

We drove very, very slowly.

And then I threw a tulip out the back door to take a photo symbolic of this Valentine’s Day.

I wanted to write a Valentine Blizzard poem for you.

(I intended to call it “Tulips in the Snow”.  Doesn’t that sound like a Joan Baez song?)

But Banjo Man is calling from the living room.  We have yet another tv show (thanks to Amazon) called “Bosch”, about a police detective in Hollywood trying to solve multiple murders.

I think we have seven more episodes to watch, which should keep us busy until the power goes out and we freeze to death, leftover dumplings stuck to our chins.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Love,

More Pie