We have had too much death recently. Each death takes a considerable amount of dealing with and when they stack up on each other, another one coming before the worst edge is off the last one, life gets overwhelming. We have had four with a fifth in the offing. Painting helps, but some days, just focusing on doing the dishes and walking the dog helps more. Nancy Gorman

It was a short one, but had more impact than the longer one earlier this winter. The long one lasted a few days and brought more snow, but my husband wasn't stuck in Florida for that one. Having cancelled his trip to visit his mother during the first blizzard, he didn't want to upset her by cancelling for a blizzard again. She's 96. So he brought in a pile of wood for me, made sure I remembered how to use the battery pack we'd retrieved from the boat for the first blizzard, and left. His...

We made it home from our sailing vacation but the last bit was a challenge. The engine broke so we had to sail from Cape Elizabeth home, which isn't a problem in nice weather, but it wasn't - lumpy 4' following seas, winds light and variable. It turned out we could have just waited but the prediction was for the seas to continue to rise and the wind to shift to dead on our nose so we would have to tack (zigzag) upwind. We aren't as young as we were so we tried to play it safe. The first day...