Since I write on Tuesdays, my weather and news-related comments can be slightly irrelevant by the time it hits the newsstands on Friday.

With that in mind, a big storm is threatening, with snow up north and tons of rain and wind for us. To my credit, I believed the forecasters (for once) and gathered in a good amount of wood and tarped the dwindling supply outside.

Huge thanks to son, Reuben, who keeps it cut, split and stacked.

There is nothing quite like cozying up to a roaring woodstove on a cold and rainy day. I actually have a workable cookstove which I use all winter. The oven is a little tricky and takes some practice. Bread making can be challenging as the loaves need to be rotated a few times. The oven has hot and cooler areas. Beans and casseroles are much easier. Biscuits require a hot, fast fire. Small, dry wood is refereed to as biscuits wood.

My stove, purchased years ago from Knox Stove Company in Tennessee, is made chiefly for the Amish. It replaced an elderly cast iron that I must have inherited somewhere.

Now that the snowdrops have seen better days, scilla (Siberian squill) and puschkinia (Lebanon squill) have taken over. They are blue with similar habits to snowdrops, however, they do not spread as reliably. The bulbs can be purchased in the fall and are inexpensive given their long and productive lives.

My double daffys are beginning to bloom. I searched in vain for them in various seed catalogs. The late Tina Fisher gave me a few clumps sometime in the 90s.

I noticed the field at Nip ‘n’ Tick Farm is much greener than my lawn. Decades of horses and cows will do that to a property.

Speaking of poo, the Canada Geese have visited a property in Chilmark that I tend. Their “fertilizer” covers every square inch of a very large lawn. It is impossible to avoid stepping in it.

I went into Seven Gates on Monday. There are some sweet little brooks along the road. The edges are covered with newly emerged skunk cabbage (symplocarpus foetidus).

Supposedly, the young leaves can be boiled in several changes of water and eaten. So far, thank goodness, I am not that desperate, but good to know. I’m sticking to kale for now. Most of what I know about gardening is from trial and error — mostly the latter.

Recently, I was involved in the pruning of an old camellia. It still has life but the top was mostly dead. Deer had started the pruning process. Some of the cut branches had tiny shoots of new life about two inches long.

I brought home several, dipped them into a rooting compound and placed them on a propagating mat into a heavy vermiculite and potting soil mixture. Wouldn’t it be fun to get a few baby camellias? Time will tell. I’ll keep you informed.

Speaking of informed, I have friends and family who claim to never watch the news. That is certainly their right. I, however, have been a political junkie since the early 60s. We had three stations available on television at that time. The evening news was always on right after supper.

I remember how powerful it was for me to hear about civil rights. My senior year in high school saw me experiencing the assassination of John Kennedy. I saw Jack Ruby in real-time shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.

These events colored the rest of my life. Plus, I’m just plain nosy and love to know what goes on in the world.

As a history major in college, I learned history a little differently than in my rural Pennsylvania high school history class. This may be either an apology for including my world view every week or maybe just an explanation. Also, I am giving everyone a break this week before the presidential election gets into full gear.