Frozen pipes and colder noses: The Winter of 2011

What's a body to do except shiver and moan. The cold, and the reaction to it, gets painful after awhile. Some pipes in walls exposed to the wind and extreme cold have frozen. Hoping for a slight thaw tomorrow...Are we remembering a colder winter this year and forgetting winters of the past? Is it really as unusually bad as my bones tell me it is?

Stephen Foster's classic of 'Love and Theft,':

Massas in De Cold, Cold Ground

Down in de cornfieldH

Hear dat mournful sound:

All de dark-eyes am a-weeping,

Massa's in de cold, cold ground.

or remembering, much more pertinently to this New Year where we struggle for hope but seem able to continue to wonder, trying to fight despair, only about the future, Gil Scott-Heron's anthem/ode from the 70s -

"And now its winter/
Winter in America...
and all the healers been done killed or sent away,
..But the people know..
Save your souls from Winter in America."

Given the economic and political polarization of American institutions and society,  the political metaphors are not lost, it seems, when compared with this brutal winter of 2011.