The winters come now as fast as snowflakes....It was summer, and now again it is winter. -- Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, December 7, 1856

This is what my backyard vista looked like yesterday, sometime before noon. An hour or so after this picture was taken a tree on the far right (slightly visible through the fork of the two trees at the corner of the porch rail) broke off about twelve feet up and now lies horizontal, its top brushing Lynn's old playhouse and its branches encircling the small fir.

It began snowing late Christmas Eve but then stopped. When I went out for the paper Christmas morning there was a crunchy slush less than an inch deep over the driveway. The second snowfall began just after daybreak and continued until nearly dark. In all we had about nine inches.

And so this morning on the Feast of Stephen the snow did lie round about, deep and crisp and even. Jonathan across the street cleared the driveway and the walks late yesterday afternoon, and this morning there was a thin pad of squishy snow that my footsteps dinted on my trek to get the paper.

In some ways the Feast of Stephen is my favorite day. Both my outer and my inner preparations for Christmas have been completed and borne fruit, and on this day I traditionally open a new paper notebook and begin again the pursuits I've withdrawn from since Thanksgiving. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I'm up before dawn, eager to plunge ahead.

I've changed the look and feel of this space. Regular readers know that my activity here was sporadic at best over the past several months. I tried a new method, didn't like it, nearly abandoned the whole thing. For the first time I posted nothing for more than two months.

But I've taken this up again, with a new theme. For years I've had the idea to write a chronicle of a suburban year, to do for life in a middle-class tract development what other writers have done for family farms, the wine country in France, the woods of Maine and Massachusetts, the toney bedroom communities outside New York City.

I take as my model Henry David Thoreau. Many people think his Walden is merely a daily journal of his time at the pond. Rather, it is a collection of essays that he honed for eight years after he left the cabin for a more conventional life. His raw material was in the notebooks he kept, both before and after his sojourn. In all, they comprise thirty-nine volumes. "My themes shall not be far-fetched," he wrote in 1856. "I will tell of homely everyday phenomena and adventure."

And so will I. I hope you'll come along.