Looking out a side window I was surprised to see footprints through the deep snow marching down un-shoveled steps to my basement door. It was one of those many-degrees-below-zero mornings and a large deer was curled up against the door, soaking up whatever heat might be escaping. Very wise, and likely able to withstand the cold. One cannot fathom how homeless folks survive in this weather.
The good folks on the radio news tell me more snow is on the way and, much as I love winter, this season has gone on too long. As writer Willa Cather beautifully wrote in her novel My Antonia more than a century ago, Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. Particularly in a time of pandemic she absolutely nailed it.
About half of Iowa vaccine providers can deny access to noncustomers, nonpatients Clark Kauffman, Iowa Capital Dispatch
Why is Iowa ranked among the slowest for COVID-19 vaccine distribution?
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Roughly one-half of Iowa’s 1,700 providers of the COVID-19 vaccine are free to deny the vaccine to noncustomers, according to state health officials.
With many Iowa clinics and hospitals refusing the vaccine to anyone who is not already doing business with them as a patient, some Iowans must go to pharmacies that may not be local, or that lack the same level of staffing and experience in giving vaccines.
The doe looks a little scruffy, healthy but scruffy, like she got hung up in some plant or other that clung to her fur. Over the years whenever there is iced snow on the ground I do something some might condemn, I pour alfalfa pellets on the snow near my drive to help deer get through the winter.
For reasons I can t even begin to unravel I missed Christmas last month, missed it completely. No tree, no family, no multitude of heavenly hosts, no hope. December was the culmination of the worst year of my entire long life. Many of you will know whereof I speak.