Ah yes, here we are again in February. You, me, the guy next to you. We’re all in it together.
February is the Wednesday of winter. Right smack dab in the middle of the season, it’s kind of like what we affectionately refer to as hump day–the day in the middle of the week that we have to get over before it’s all downhill to the weekend.
Only, in this case, at the bottom of the hill is spring.
Yes, it’s still very gray outside, as shades of gray go. Snow may yet cover the ground again. And winter coats are still often required.
And yet it’s there, somewhere. That hint of spring. Whether it’s the exposed grass, a winter coat brazenly left unbuttoned, or above-freezing temperatures, the lovely indicators are beginning to emerge.
There’s something else, too. A familiarity in the air. Haven’t we felt this before, perhaps around the very same time last year? It’s the light, I think. Wonderful, bright, shadow-inducing sunlight. There’s just so much more of it this month. Or rather, an hour or two seems like so much more.
Think back, way back, to November, when darkness fell–could it be?–just after 4 p.m. Look out your window these days at 4:30, even 5 and it still looks like day. Every year this seems to astound us. “Why,” we say to our coworkers or muse to ourselves, “it’s almost 5:30, and it’s still light out.”
Then, we think back to those dark days of November and December when the sunlight would have been long gone by 5:30. We shudder at the thought. But we managed that misery mainly because the darkness was brightened by all those Christmas lights.
Even though it is getting lighter earlier, it is February, and so it is still winter. Definitely. A couple of red-bowed wreaths hang high on the houses of a few neighbors. Multicolored lights and a star adorn a small fir tree in the front yard of the house across the street, although the lights no longer come on. Even at my house, poinsettias, with rough but still-red leaves, line the stairs in the foyer. All signs that Christmas was not all that long ago.
And, of course, of course, we can still get whacked with a snowstorm. The chances for that, while decreasing, are far from over. By March, we want so much to believe that the green will soon replace the white, but those hopes can be dashed so quickly with just a few innocent inches of white.
But here in late mid-February, it’s like late afternoon on Wednesday. The easier part of the week is just a day away. Tomorrow is Thursday, and that means when something goes wrong, or if the day is turning out to be especially lousy, well, we can say, “At least the next day is Friday.”
And so, at least next month is March.
It ain’t great.
But it’s all we’ve got for now.
