After three days of confinement, you don't need to take your temperature to diagnose the ailment: Cabin fever!

The symptoms mount. Pacing. Has the newspaper come? Tired of reading. Sick of TV, including the New Hampshire slugfest and the hoarse, hollering "Hardball."

We're both guilty of crimes against Dr. Atkins: "Let's have a nice cup of tea with a crumpet." ... "How about some popcorn? It's only lightly buttered." ... "Since it's Susan's birthday, let's have a small slice of her wonderful fruitcake." ... "Don't you think we might break down and have just one tiny square of the Swiss chocolate you gave me for Christmas?"

Sure, it's a lovely, panoramic view from the den windows -- a sparkling clean world blanketed in white. And we don't have to go anywhere! There is plenty of food -- vitamin-loaded vegetable soup, rotisserie chicken, frozen Casa Carbone pizza.

But the cold outside is piercingly painful. I only wish I could tolerate in-the-teens temperatures as blithely as the pretty student rushing across the N.C. State campus a couple of days before the crippling storm.

She was well-bundled, at least from head to waist, against the 37 degree day. But between sweater and low-slung jeans, a strip of midriff bare as a baby's bottom was blue with chill bumps. Nestled within the navel was a small ring, apparently placed to enhance her message to the world, a message I'm still trying to decipher.

Color me colorless if you like, but I've never regarded the navel as a thing of beauty. At best, it suggests an unfinished work, or perhaps a plumbing project closed for repairs.

A couple of nights later, after watching a TV rerun of the great classic, "Inherit the Wind," I was scanning Proverbs for the origin of the title. Aha! In Chapter 11: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."

A few verses down, another proverb jumped off the page at me, resurrecting the image of the student with the nonconforming navel: "As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion."

So much for Proverbs and back to a case of cabin fever brought on by being three days snowbound. A major part of my therapy is bird-watching.

In the role of a poor man's St. Francis of Assisi, I nevertheless practice my prejudices. For one thing, I despise the constant flurry of the common finches that gorge themselves from dawn to dusk.

Not long ago, I complained to a salesman at the local bird feed store about the plethora of house finches hogging the perches at my thistle feeder and denying access to my coveted goldfinches.

"Oh, you may have the wrong kind of thistle feeder," he said, leading me over to a plastic tubular feeder with thin slits down its length. This one seems to attract the goldfinches that, unlike many common finches, have no problem eating from an upside down position. Eureka! But, like the undeserving poor, hordes of house finches still hog the sunflower seed station.

I do delight in the ultimate in squirrel-proof birdfeeders, a Christmas gift from my wife. Battery-operated, it is designed so that when a squirrel lands on the feeder, it is hurled halfway to Mars, a fur-covered rocket traveling faster than the speed of sound.

I would invite you out to view this greatest show on earth were the performances not so limited. As the manager of the bird emporium said as I roared with laughter while watching the demonstration film, "If you're buying this feeder for entertainment, don't. Squirrels aren't dummies. One time around usually is enough."

Who can deny or even ignore the drama of a snowstorm? Standing in front of the bank of den windows that afford a view of the ever-changing landscape, I look across the back lawn into the woodland. The gaunt, gnarled old oaks stand stark naked against the mantle of white, much like old men stepping ever so cautiously out of the bath tub. And there is a stillness in a city that is seldom still.

Not long from now, in the ever-lengthening daylight, the old trees' branches will begin, almost secretly, pushing out swollen buds, awaiting the soft touch of spring. At their feet, beneath the blanket of leaves, hundreds of decades-old daffodils will splash the woodland with a yellow glow.

And Wordsworth's lines will bridge the barrier of our season of discontent:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats high o'er vales and hills

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils.

Before February fades, the bluebirds will be back. To stay. Aurora will be hitching her horses a few moments earlier every single day. For, lo! Winter will be past and the voice of the turtle will be heard in the land.