Snow:When I informed friend and retired Baptist reverend Bob Mullinax that the new pastor at First Baptist Church is moving in three doors up from us, he quipped, "Reminds me of the guy found hiding in the bedroom closet and, asked by the husband what he was doing there, replied, 'Everybody's got to be somewhere!'"

A.C. Snow:Ogden Nash wrote, "God in his wisdom made the fly and then forgot to tell us why." I'm wondering if God didn't do the same thing with the squirrel. At least, why so many?

Among the flotsam and jetsam of today's economic backwash, the deserving poor, and even the undeserving poor, are having a tougher time than most.

Snow:The bed, the bulb or a room with a view?

Snow:In his "Spoon River Anthology," poet Edgar Lee Masters wrote, "Sex is the curse of life!"

A.C. Snow:She called from Eastern North Carolina to ask whether I remembered a certain poem from her childhood.

As time's winged chariot rushes ever onward, I admit to the widening generation gap between many of thee and me. But that's not to say I'm well beyond being surprised.

Our state legislature must abound with bullies. Or else some form of an anti-bullying law for public schools would have been enacted by now.

Snow:When I was a wee lad, I had two abiding fears: death and mad dogs, i.e., rabid canines.

From the tone of the e-mail, it was apparent the writer was high on something. The drug turned out to be spring.

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,