Yesterday, just as the snow madness was about to overtake me, the eldest yelled, “Mom, the mail is here.”

In my girlhood I’d read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series, one book after another, and I wondered anew about having a blizzard come on without two days of weatherman hype. Hard to imagine, as my youngest played Wii, that there was a time when I would have tied a rope to his waist to make sure he would not get lost in a snow drift on the way to the restroom. Still, Ms. Wilder’s fate seemed to pale in comparison to the suffering I have endured here on the Kansas plains as my mailman seems to take issue with delivering anything larger than a letter size envelope.

But yesterday, the March issue of AD arrived. Am I going to spill forth image after image, spoiling your first look at the silvery grain of the pickled cypress paneling in the Richard Keith Langham project? Nope. Deny you the pleasure of re-Klineing with Michael Smith? I won’t. How about just a peek at a Paris home a la Grange? No way. But if you have to walk into town through two feet of snow because you can’t get your horse out of the barn? I think it’s worth it.

Image, Architectural Digest, March, 2011, design by Michael Smith; photography by Pieter Estersohn.