The month of January is a long and often depressing month for me. It comes on the heels of the excitement and the flurry of activity of the Holiday season and there is absolutely NOTHING exciting going on. The days are short and miserably cold and the nights are long and seem to drag on endlessly and miserably cold.....and the lack of daylight plays right into the wheelhouse of a sad winter seasonal depression for me. Friends and family are gone back home after festive parties and visits and I've packed up all the Christmas fun and tucked it all back into boxes in the attic for next year. In January we all begin our diets and healthy resolutions and it becomes almost a season of denial and deprivation. Holidays and vacation days are over and there is nothing left to celebrate for several months. Superbowl Sunday? Might as well be Stupor-Bowl Sunday as far as I'm concerned.
It's especially wearying for me now that my kids are not home. There's no routine of homework or playing taxi-car mom; no dance lessons, PTA meetings, karate lessons or band practice to fill my evenings. Many nights, I'm home alone. I'm stuck inside...even on the weekends.... because it's too cold for hiking, motorcycle trips, neighborhood walks, gardening, or even sitting outside by the fireplace at night. And there are lots of gray and overcast days. Dreary, misty, gloomy, lonely, and seemingly endless winter days. We don't get a lot of snow....just drizzle and cold. I hate how the grass turns brown and dead-looking and the trees look so bare and naked and cold without their leaves. It's almost as if the earth herself is in mourning.
I am a much more temperate climate kind of girl. I don't like the extremes of hot and cold. I love autumn and spring...when it's chilly in the mornings and evenings...but warm enough during the day to be out and about and enjoy the outdoors. I love sweater-weather. I enjoy sunshine and warm breezes and flowers and green grass and the hope of spring......or the kaleidoscope of Autumn leaves and brisk, golden, poignant days of fall. Not the brown of the dead of winter.
That's not to say that there is nothing to love about winter. It's not ALL bad. I love the way it looks in the early morning at sunrise when there is a heavy frost on the fields behind my house and a mist clings just above the frosty diamond-crusted grass. I love watching the deer skitter and romp through the frosty fields. I love a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning....the rich aroma and how just holding the mug warms my hands. I love snuggling under cozy warm quilts on cold nights. I love warm fuzzy socks and bowls of hot soup. I love curling up under a blanket to read a good book and I love that my favorite shows on TV are not yet reruns. I love leafing through gardening magazines and dreaming of what all I will plant in the spring time! I love wearing sweaters and scarves and hats. I love snow days! I love the way my cheeks get pink when we walk in the cold. I love wearing boots! I love to bake in the winter...warming my home with my oven and the tantalizing aromas of baking cookies or brownies for my husband. I love filling my bird-feeder with suet cakes and lots of seeds for the winter birds who frequent my yard. I love hot baths on a cold night....slipping into a tub of soothing, steaming water that soaks out the coldness and fills me with warmth.
I love that Valentine's Day is in February and I love that the day we celebrate LOVE is also my wedding anniversary! I love celebrating each passing year with the love of my life.....and realizing that our love only grows sweeter as we grow older and seeing how our relationship has evolved and matured over time into such a deep, enduring, and precious love. It honestly does keep getting better and better....beyond my wildest imagination. I never knew my heart could be so full.
I love Groundhogs Day. I know it's goofy to like such a weird "holiday" where we humans ask a buck-toothed rodent to predict the weather with his shadow....but I do love it.....and the fact that it's kindda goofy makes me like it even more. I guess because it's a somewhat lesser holiday with no hype or pomp and circumstance, no decorations and no greeting cards....and I'm always such a sucker for an under-dog! I think I will plan on making Groundhog Cupcakes this year to celebrate! I might go whole-hog and decorate a Groundhog Tree!!! But probably not.
I always hope for snow. We don't get much snow here in Tennessee...but when we do it's a major event! Everything closes down, it takes 6 hours to drive the distance that usually takes 20 minutes and folks go NUTS....buying every gallon of milk and loaf of bread in the tri-state area. I'm not sure WHY we buy so much milk and bread. But we do; it's mandatory snow-day procedure. We turn into milk-and-bread-craving-zombies. We must also make snow-cream.....a most delicious confection made of snow, vanilla, and some kind of beautiful, beautiful voodoo magic!! I love the way it get so quiet when it snows. The world becomes soft and white and peacefully silent. The beauty of pristine white snow covering everything with clean pure whiteness is the very imagery of how grace and forgiveness work in my life. They cover up the ugly and dirty and make me white as snow. Such a lovely thought! I also love how in the gazillion and gazillion of snowflakes that fall.....no two snowflakes are exactly the same.....another testimony to the majesty of creation!
So....I guess winter is actually just another season......not good nor bad....but ever-changing, ever-moving. It's sometimes enchanting and sometimes harsh. I suppose I just need to change my perspective....for without the bitter coldness, I'd never longingly anticipate the warmth of springtime or the summer breezes on my face or the tickle of newly green and tender grass underneath my bare feet. It takes the experience of one extreme to learn to appreciate the others. Each season unfolds it's own beauties and secrets and magic. The trick is to learn to search out the magic and treat each moment as a special blessing.....winter, spring summer or fall.
My assignment that I'm giving myself for the next few weeks: Seek out the magical, the special, the splendorous and marvelous things about winter!! I want to pay attention and live in the present....fully engaged. I want to look for the blessings and diminish the complaining and whining and the pity parties. It's bound to have a profound and positive effect on my outlook and ease my loneliness and heartache to catalogue everything that's good and wonderful all around me!
Challenge accepted!!!
