Sometimes I feel like Lawrence of Arabia here in western Maine.

“What is it, exactly, Major Lawrence, that attracts you, personally, to the desert?”
“It’s clean.”
“Now, that’s a very illuminating answer.”

And so it is with me. There was four or five inches of fresh snow overnight — frosting for the first day of spring cake –which at least covered all the grime that accumulates in the snowbanks as they decay. We are cold a lot. We get dirty sometimes. My little son can make handprints in the rime on the inside of the windows in the morning. There is a belching, hulking industrial building the size of Oz squatting over the river a mile or two from here.

But it’s clean.