Snow has been falling for hours, piling up at the river's edge. The hawk returned this morning and is perched in the high branches not far from my window. From his vantage point he overlooks, as I do, the screeching sea gulls, a dozen or so Canadian geese, and a pair of blue herons. The red cardinal and his less flamboyant red-capped mate are clustered around the bird feeder on our deck, do-si-doeing with some mourning doves and a few finches as bird seed shells splash onto the ground below.

It's been a momentous winter already and it's barely the middle of February. For me, hearth and home have taken on new meaning. As I warm myself in front of my living room's gas fueled fireplace, the fire's flames remind me of my good fortune. Unlike many of my countrymen, I haven't been stranded on a highway on my way to work due to a white out, sequestered in an airport due to massive flight cancelations, or forced to survive for an extended period without lights or heat due to downed electrical lines. I haven't even had to forgo trips to the grocery store or the gym in my neighborhood due to icy streets or untreated sidewalks.

There's snow piled tall on the side of the road, the result of snow blowers and snow plows for which I am also grateful. In my childhood in the Chicago area tall towers like that were hand built, shovel-by-shovel. Even little kids like us were recruited into service to clear the driveway so the fathers in the neighborhood could get their cars out for work.

This year our community, like many others, is running out of salt. We've shared our personal supply with a friend whose husband walks with a cane. Several weeks ago some critters got into our house between the floors and the tap dance overhead was annoying for a few days but all's quiet now. They either fled to the outdoors or have frozen to death inside.

I wonder about the lessons of winter for those of us who have well insulated houses that don't require the work of splitting wood to heat them. For those of us with warm coats and gloves, cars in good repair, and the money to put gas in them, we can keep up our schedule of frenetic activities, pretending that the changing seasons have no effect on us. Or we can take advantage of nature's frozen landscape, take this time to go inward and look outward, and notice what it takes to survive and thrive in both arenas.