A snowy St. Patrick's Day in NY. I used to like the parade -- I'm a sucker for bagpipes -- but over the years it's turned into a rowdy, I'm-more-crocked-than-you-are scene. It's illegal to bring booze to the parade now but that only means people determined to get smashed do their drinking on the way in, arrive drunk, act like a soccer crowd, and do more drinking after it's over. And besides, it's snowing. So I did my duty by the Irish by spending an hour this morning in my favorite local cafe, an Irish joint where I go a couple of times a week to drink tea and worry over the snags in whatever I'm writing. On Wednesdays in bad weather a preschool playgroup meets in the back room and the place is crawling, as it were, with babies. It's kind of great.

I came back home, wrote for awhile, and noticed a sure sign of spring: ants. Not so much on the plants (not that they don't work the plants, but I wouldn't see them) but on my desk. I live on the second floor of a NYC apt. building, so this is a little stranger than it might otherwise be. But every year I get little ants, not the big ones or ones that bite, just little busy ones. They crawl over my keyboard and along my papers, not many, two or three or half a dozen at a time, looking for something to eat. They vanish in April, when I guess they go outdoors, and reappear in September, gone again by late October, after a frost or two. They must have a nest in the wall someplace. I never see them in the rest of the apartment; they never even make it to the kitchen. Just over here where I write, as busy as I am, and probably a good deal more productive.