The days have been getting longer here since mid-December. I know it’s a psychological thing but something important happens at the solstice, particularly for those of us not fond of long, cold nights and short days washed by thin, anemic sunlight.
Something clicks and a weight is lifted. The light is coming back. The world is going to keep turning. Everything will be alright.
Then, February comes. February with its mere 28 days. Capricious and intemperate, gray one day, bright and cunningly warm the next. It’s enough to drive you to go to a tropical place for days at a time, hoping against hope that the mandatory inconvenient snow storm happens on the first day you’re out of town and is cleared up by the time you must subject yourself to the TSA‘s ministrations on the way home.
This shortest of months isn’t all bad, though. It is in February that if you’re really paying attention you have empirical proof that the days are getting longer. It is in late February, just after our second holiday in less than a month, that you have that first hopeful, flickering thought: maybe I don’t need to turn on the porch light this morning. Maybe, just maybe, it will still be light out when I get home.
And it is in late February that the birds start showing back up, mobbing the side yard feeder that all winter we’ve only had to fill once a week but now requires attention every other day. It is as February turns to March that we insane morning people get our bird songs back.
I can hear them even as I type, chirping, tweedling, and waking up the world, and it makes me smile.
I was feeling pretty good this morning till I read about the new community being built in Naples Florida. Suddenly, no amount of additional light could bring me out of my torpor.
There is something inordinately reassuring about the coming of spring, isn’t there? Actually, demented child that I am, I like the changing of the seasons in general, not just the roll-over into spring. For me, it’s like a connection to the cycles and rhythms of life … a reminder that “this too, shall pass.” Enjoy those signs of spring, the coming of the light.