1981

Yup, we're getting snow in D.C. lots of it and my neighbors are reacting in the only way that they know how: madly. You'd think Armageddon was tomorrow, as people struggle with the fact that Starbucks may not get its delivery of whole milk or Blockbuster has no more copies of Clueless. When I lived in Massachusetts, ugly storms were a fact of life; I remember trudging 15 miles to the country store, with the snow and wind blowing 30 knots, only hardtack in my pocket, and.. .but that's a different story, one I need to save so that I can bore my grandchildren.

But it's not snowing in Florida, home of Frasier Smith, whose name has appeared in this column more times in the last few months than Charo's. Just after I sent my last column to Hanover, Frasier forwarded me photographs of his work. (You will remember, kind reader, that in December's column I wrote that Frasier carved wooden quilts. No doubt you reacted with a loud, "Huh?") Well, you've got to see these photographs. Not only do these quilts look like beautiful pieces of Americana that Grandma Oakes might've made when the wind and snow howled 'cross the plains, and, down to their last handful of coal, Grandpa headed out into the sleety jaws of...oops. Sorry. Frasier's "quilts" are incredibly colorful and filled with details: wrinkles, folds, the textures of different kinds of cloth, what you might expect when looking at a normal quilt. Except these are made from basswood, and you hang them on walls; I can't imagine one would be all that comfortable at the foot of your bed.

OK, here's news not about Frasier. Kristin Lindgren was an English major at Dartmouth, but I never met her; while she was busy reading Joyce and Keats and Woolf, I was busy in classes like "In the Beginning: The Letters A, B, and C" and "The Moderately Challenging Works of S.E. Hinton." Kristin and husband Alex live just outside of Philly in Marion; Alex teaches Latin and Greek at The Episcopal Academy there while our classmate's taken time off from her parttime teaching at Haverford so that she can finish her dissertation and care for three-year-old son Anders. Done with coursework at Bryn Mawr, Kristin is writing on the "rhetoric of reproduction"; I didn't ask, so you don't either.

And here are two more teacher types: Amanda Anderson and Allen Hance are a husband-wife team at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana. Allen's an assistant professor of philosophy and focuses on the German idealists, and Amanda is an associate professor in the department of English, concentrating on those big fat Victorian novels. (I don't think Amanda and I crossed paths in that Hinton class either.) Imagine dinner conversation at this household? When my wife and I sit down to eat, I'm usually complaining about the cat puking. This pair has a two-year-old boy named Jackson, and Allen confesses to being a passionate fly-fisherman who even traipses about the local farm ponds looking for bass. In fact when these three recently drove to Orford, N.H., to see Allen's folks, he stopped so many times on the way out to fish that when it came time to head back to Illinois, Amanda and Jackson flew rather than ride with Crazy Husband/Dad.

If people are looking for a good spring read, here's non-fiction to keep you busy: Allen recommended Landscape and Memory, which discusses different perceptions of the environment, and I'll suggest In TheseGirls, Hope is a Muscle, which chronicles a season with the Amherst (Mass.) Regional High School girls' varsity basketball team.

4807 Dover Road, Bethesda, MD 20816, ; 1047 Lincoln Blvd., Apt. 10, Santa Monica, CA 90403