February

It’s February – mercifully, the shortest month of the year. The sacred holiday season is behind us, the energy of a new year has subsided, and the groundhog – short of telling me it will be seventy degrees and sunny by tomorrow – will report nothing that can satisfy my need for the certainty of sunshine.

I like to think, as I sit wrapped in sweaters (yes, plural) in the northern hemisphere, that I weather winter well. It’s part of nature’s rhythm and therefore part of my own. It is the after-lunch lull that lasts a season – the knowing that we need to be productive but for just this minute it’s ok to let our eyes drift shut. Even the trees sleep, and I can’t claim to have wisdom deeper than those ancient roots. So I let myself go quiet with the silencing of the woods that live right outside these walls.

But I’m watching. I’m waiting. I’m listening for the first bird of morning to return and reassure the world that this season will pass. And slowly, surely, the warmth I have been injesting and wrapping around me all winter will seep from my bones into the soil, and from just beneath its skin the earth will awaken. It will start slowly, as will I when I wake from winter. But it will stretch toward the brightening sun the way a babe reaches for a mother’s arms. Spring will come, and the world will know it is home again. And it will take me along for another miraculous jaunt around the sun.

It is February. But not for long.