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roasted them in a deep pan with salt, olive oil, cloves of unshucked garlic, and sprigs of thyme. You ladle off the juice every twenty minutes or so and freeze it for a sweet, delicate stock best consumed during snowstorms. The residual pulp gathers body from the garlic and spirit from the thyme. The spent garlic, when squeezed warmly from its husk directly upon your tongue, will slacken your face and make you shimmy.
    The stock and the pulp are in my little chest freezer now, down in the basement where the fuel oil furnace has been firing all day. I can hear the blower kick in, a muffled rumble followed shortly by a huff of warm air through the grate. I am on the second floor at the head of the stairs, standing at a window overlooking the garden, which is comprised mostly of raised beds—loaves of soil contained by rectangular frames constructed from two-by-twelve planks in the manner of a sandbox. The tomatoes that hung from that plant were pale yellow and big as a baby’s head. I grew them from a seed harvested from a plant sown by my sister-in-law. She planted her garden in spring and didn’t live to see fall, killed in a car wreck in her seventh week as my brother’s wife. The tomatoesare called Amish Yellows. We write “Sarah’s Tomatoes” on the little plastic flags.
    The windows in this old house are loose. The wind sets them to rattling. Looking down, I have my face close to the pane, so close I raise a little fog and smell that cold window glass smell, the scent of ice and dust. The wind rises and seeps past the sill. I imagine this outside air purling and tumbling through the warm inside air the way water curls through whiskey. My nose is cold at the window. The earth is frozen dirt. I think of the grave.
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    In the post office lobby, down to the Gas-N-Go, at the monthly meeting of the fire department, everyone I meet is bemoaning the lack of snow. Nobody—not even the natives—likes the cold, but cold and white you can take. Snow obscures the grit and covers the trash. Snow pretties up the scene. Renders it bearable. Whereas cold and brown leads to drink and desolation. All around town the snowmobilers are moping, their sleds trailered up and waiting. They drive to the bar in their pickup trucks and pine for a blizzard so they might drive to the bar on their snowmobiles. Even at twenty below, snow brightens the bleak earth. It is a postcard effect, and won’t do you a lick of good if you slip and break your hip on the way to the mailbox, but it can be enough to keep you off the sauce. On a more fundamental level, it insulates the topsoil, limiting the depth of freeze. Exposed as they are, my raised beds are extra vulnerable. I neglected to mulch them with straw last fall, and now they are frozen through and through. The last couple of years I have been nursing a haphazard little collection of perennials. Summer savory, some sage, and a delicious cluster of lemon thyme. Now they are almost certainly dead forever.
    I am an idiot for failing to mulch. It would have taken me all of fifteen minutes. I’m particularly chagrined about the lemon thyme. It was a gift from my friends John and Julie. Every year they oversee a magnificent garden. They sprouted a cutting, folded it into a moist paper towel, sealed the packet in a baggie, and sent it to me through the mail. I got it to take root and it thrived. By the end of summer I was using it to makepan-roasted breast of chicken. A little olive oil, a little brown chicken stock, some pepper, and the clean lemony notes of the thyme. Simple. Delicious. Now the green is gone, the bush a sparse tangle of stems.
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    As a longtime bachelor it is a matter of overblown personal pride that less than ten frozen pizzas have crossed my threshold since I bought this house. Sadly, there have been other lapses. A few years back, I had some blood work done. My “bad” cholesterol was mildly elevated. If it gets any higher, my general