February

"Winters in Neely are mostly sadly predictable and barren and colorless and genuinely forlorn. Momma is the one of us who tends to suffer most through the season. She holds up well enough until Christmas and on into the New Year, but by the first week in February Momma is a lost woman. On February afternoons Momma turns on all the lamps in the house and sits in the livingroom in one of Grandma Yount's burgandy boudoir chairs where she applies herself to the same novel she has been reading off and on for six years now...

But no matter the lamps and the distractions, the last two weeks in February tend to take Momma under and occasionally she frets and cries and tells Daddy how she has to get away from Neely, how she has to get away from February, how she'd nearly be willing to die for a spring day. And Daddy puts his arms around Momma and rocks with her to hush her up, and sometimes he'll drive us out to the Holiday Inn on the by-pass where he treats Momma to a meal she doesn't have to cook or wash up after, and Daddy talks to the waitresses and talks to the other customers and tells me and Momma how he's been considering pulling up roots and moving to Buffalo where he says Momma can have her own caldron to stew in and I can go to the store with actual ice under my sled runners and Daddy tells how he'll buy us a fleet of Buicks to run off into gullies and just generally slosh around in. Wouldn't that be grand? Daddy says. Wouldn't that be the life? And Momma abides him with a smile."

from "A Short History of a Small Place" by T.R. Pearson

That is just at tiny part of my favorite part in my favorite book, and I think about it every February. We were lucky this year with a very warm mild winter, but the last week or so has been pure winter. Nights in the 20s, cloudy gray days, wind, blackbirds in the bare trees, me sniffling with a cold... I'd nearly be willing to die for a spring day right about now. I have been working in my sewing room all morning, ironing mostly because it's warm and soothing, but C and I took a walk outside to look at the buds on the trees, just to remind us that Spring really is on it's way in. If we can just get through February...