01.27.16  I’ll be in California as January fades away.  As often happens with me, I am already nostalgic.  There was so much I was going to do during this month of darkness, cozy by the fire, wrapped in tartan blankets.  But, I didn’t get around to that long list, and now we have 90 more minutes of daylight than we did on January 1st.  There are a mere 16 more minutes at the start of the day–it’s dark out my window as I write this at 8:00 a.m.–but a whopping 74 minutes of light has been added on to the end of the day, and increasing, of course.   It always takes me by surprise.

It’s been easy this week to be nostalgic for January.  One afternoon it was 40 degrees and sunshine so bright I wore sunglasses.  Black-cap Chickadees were merrily chirping in the bushes, green grass patches were everywhere in the snow, and the road beneath my feet was dry.  There was hope for Spring in the air.  Oh, we have a long ways to go before that, and, hopefully, much more accumulating snowpack to sustain us through the fire season in August.  But the darkness is letting up, and it’s easy to look forward to Winter losing its grip.  It’s a bit of a dangerous time we move into now, however, allowing ourselves to be weary of the season, looking for a different one, and for our lives to start over in a new way.

As I think about the passing of these days, I love what Tom Hennen writes in his poem, “The Life of a Day“:

“…Usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, such as autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle.  For some reason we want to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t care to reach our last one for a long time.  We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t the one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real…”