Snow:When neighbor Aileen Pressley offered to drive us to the airport for our recent two-week vacation in Italy and Greece, she seemed disappointed that we had already made other arrangements.

Snow:In 1967, former Mayor W.G. Enloe asked me to write a piece describing life in Raleigh for its residents of 2017. The document was placed in a time capsule at North Hills' Cardinal Theatre, then under construction.

Snow:By now you may have received and possibly spent your "nepenthe" from Uncle Sam.

Snow:You'd never think of Sam Johnson as a modern-day Perle Mesta, the society hostess. But as an apprentice to the title of "host with the most" in the fine art of conversation, he's doing OK.

Snow:My friend and I had met for coffee.

Snow:The crack of rifle fire jolted me from my reverie. It had been decades since I had been so close to gunfire.

Snow:Some years ago, while we were visiting Edinburgh, Scotland, our tour guide told of a Scotsman who struck up a conversation with a British fellow on the train to London.

A.C. Snow:Perhaps the most inane -- maybe "dumb" is a better word -- question put to the presidential candidates during the seemingly interminable debates was one tossed at Barack Obama in Philadelphia.

Snow:As I searched vainly for a seat at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, where former N&O reporter Liz Clarke was to read from her book "One Helluva Ride," I thought, "What am I doing here?"

Snow:My wife and I had not been long married when we received a letter bearing the return address of an attorney.

Not long ago, I mentioned that my newspaper reporter son-in-law, while stopping off in Smithfield on a political assignment, met a native who admitted to reading this column.

How many of you as parents have stuffed spinach and other disagreeables down your children's throats while pleading, "Try it, you'll like it!" The slogan rarely worked with my two, whether it was spinach, going to bed on time in summer or picking up debris on the lawn after a hurricane.

no matter if it's changing a baby's diaper, the volume on a restaurant sound system spouting noise posing as "music" at unbearable decibels or even traipsing along the multilane highway of cyberspace. But Raleigh will rue the day it plows up the Fayetteville Street Mall. This oasis of beauty in all seasons but winter is the only bright spot in the otherwise dreary landscape that is downtown Raleigh.

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."

'I hate to tell you, but I think I'll be voting for George Bush this Fall," she said, almost apologetically. I suppose you could call my older sister a "closet Independent," the only one in a large family that is 99 percent Republican, down the line. "That's OK by me," I said. "But what has caused you to make up your mind so early?"

Because of the national obsession with this year's Democratic primaries and caucuses, I've been been re-reading Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus," a compelling account of what life was like for the pack of political reporters who in 1972 trailed across America with the men who would be president. There is good writing here; on Page 1: "While reporters still snored like Hessians in a hundred beds throughout the hotel, the McGovern munchkins were at work, plying the halls, slipping legal-sized handouts through the cracks under the door ... According to one of these handouts, the Baptist Ministers' Union of Oakland had decided after 'prayerful and careful deliberation' to endorse Sen. McGovern."

Finally, February folded. But cold memories of not only the "longest month" but the entire wicked winter linger on. Remember Robert Frost's dilemma?: Some say the world will end in fire,