I have been dealing with considerable snow and cold temperatures in my neck of the woods. This is simply a statement of the activities in my environment which I perceive as fact or as a personal observation; it is not meant to be an introduction to a post on the subject of weather.

When one lives on a peninsula, the phrase a "neck of the woods" would seem to be a particularly apt choice. Looking at a map, it is quite possible that "headland" would be a more correct description of this place even though common parlance refers to it as a peninsula.

Language is a curious thing. It approximates a miracle at times--at least it seems so to me--that we understand one another (or is it each other?) at all.

One thing I enjoy about reading Michael Perry is his use of unusual or little used vocabulary--words that are much more descriptive and accurate in describing what he is about than the more common and thereby overused ones. I suspect this overuse has resulted in such words becoming almost generic in nature--trying to be all things makes for a poor job at any one thing. I wonder if Michael comes across such words in his readings or if he uses a thesaurus to locate a gem around which to craft a sentence. Then again anyone who reads Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man" in a treestand during the Wisconsin gun deer season probably has no use for a thesaurus.

It has been sometime since I made an entry in this blog; I have been struggling to come up with an idea or a topic, so I fell back on an old standby, the weather at least to break the ice--a appropriate phrase for this time of the year.  My heart really wasn't in a note on the weather, so I was easily distracted by the turn of a phrase in my opening sentence. In the end, I ended up somewhat far afield. Fields have headlands too, by the way.