The Mysterious Garden Muse

I'm not a fan of winter. It depresses me to see the sun go down in the afternoon, to see endless white and gray where green and colors used to be. No matter how many layers I wear, I'm always cold - or within memory of cold. I can stand in front of a hot radiator, soaking up the heat, but the sound of the wind whistling outside will still make me shiver. I think I'm part bear, primed to hibernate through the long winter and wake up when the bulbs start to bloom. Winter finds me watching more TV than usual (mystery shows, of course), but in winter I always read a lot, too. Even when I'm tired, I'll stay up into the wee hours to finish a book. I'm not a great one for self-analysis, but I've come to realize I respond to winter in specific ways. 1) When it's cold outside, I start compulsively solving Sudokos (sometimes giving myself a headstart by filling in a few blanks with the help of the solved puzzles at the end of the book. It's not a...

I was never in Girl Scouts, but for a short period of time I belonged to a Brownie troop. I think it was while I was a Brownie that I learned this ditty: "Make new friends, but kee-eeep the old. One is silver and the other's gold." At least, that's how I remember the words - not sure how reliable my memory is on song lyrics learned fifty-odd years ago. I bring this up because I recently realized I have a silver-and-gold relationship with books and authors. I'm not sure how it's intended in the song, but I've always taken the lyrics to mean that old friends are precious gold, and new friends are silver. By that token, my golden oldies include Agatha Christie, Mary Stewart, Ngaio Marsh, Doris Miles Disney, Patricia Wentworth, Paul Gallico, Dorothy Eden, Josephine Tey, Martha Grimes, Peter Robinson, P.D. James, Dick Francis, Ian Rankin, Evelyn Anthony, Ray Bradbury and James Thurber. My addiction to the books by many of these authors goes back near...