I caught a taxi into town in order to empty our post office box. The fact that there's a taxi service out here that will ferry me on the ten-mile round trip should make it a bit easier to be snowed in for weeks on end.

The last time I took a taxi was the last time I was in New York City sixteen years ago. During the time I lived in the city, when I was going to school in the late seventies, I rarely used taxis. Subway fares matched my budget better. I did, however, learn how to flag down a ride if I really needed one.

My most recent visit to New York only lasted a few hours. A magazine aimed at high school English students for which I'd done some freelance work sent me to interview Nicole St. John, the author of numerous young adult books. While Jane Yolen and Jeannie Moos had been happy to do phone interviews, Ms. St. John stood on her right to be interviewed in person, during high tea at the Helmsley Palace.

Needless to say, the train from Rochester pulled into Penn Station late. Now I am not normally a very assertive sort of person, but it is amazing what a whiff of those heady Manhattan exhaust fumes will do. It all came back to me. I strode out of the station, barged straight through the tourists who were milling timidly on the sidewalk, stepped into the street, grabbed the side mirror of the first Yellow Cab I saw and wrestled it to the curb, more or less.

The cabbie obliging made an illegal U-turn against eight lanes of onrushing traffic and delivered me to the gilded Palace dining room in plenty of time to juggle tape recorder, pen, notebook and tiny cucumber sandwiches while being served by waiters dressed like the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.

I thought about all that as I waited for the cab down by the road and watched a big red rooster peck at the frozen gravel a foot from where I stood.