February Doldrums

“The “doldrums” is a popular nautical term that refers to the belt around the Earth near the equator where sailing ships sometimes get stuck on windless waters.” From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

February is that sort of month. We’ve transited from the early bright lights and joy of the beginning of a New England deep winter in December to a grayer, resigned wait. The chores of winter are wearing and tiresome. The dust and mess on the floor from the woodstove are grinding me down; every evening ends with banking up a load of oak and maple for the night burn, and every morning starts around five with a few coals blown back to life with small wood and a hot start to keep the creosote buildup in the chimney to a minimum.

The snowblower is still covered with a tarp at the head of the driveway, gassed, and ready. New England Road salt is incrementally eating our car, slowly reducing it to rubble. Snow drifts quickly change from pristine white the morning after a night’s storm to grubby gray and randomly stained with occasional brown and yellow blots which we learn young not to use for snow cones. The shrubs and trees still await the greening, the winter snow load has broken them down a bit, and small branches stick up from the snow on the ground where the wind and freeze struck them off the Norway Maples, Eastern white pines, and our sole canoe birch tree. They await the spring clean-up and new mulch. The leaves that the fall raking missed linger under the snow, dark, wet, and growing mold.

February is a month of rumination, self-examination, and contemplating long thoughts. I remember Carl in Mount Vernon, Maine, where we lived for ten years before we moved to the tropics of Rhode Island. West central Maine in hill and lake country set our standard for long, cold winters. Carl was a skilled artist and a professional sign painter for local enterprises. He usually overwintered in Arizona after a long semi-annual migration in his old GMC pickup. One November he neglected his migration prep, got busy with work, and stayed. He had a large barn next to his house that doubled as his Maine studio. A wood burning furnace kept the old structure minimally functional all winter. I visited him one day in February when he was hard at work. A new ten-foot sign adorned the tall wall over the barn door. It was a spare winter scene with three-foot-high letters beautifully formed, that simply said, “It’s really bad!” When I stood admiring it, he told me that he painted it one miserable day with drifts piling up against his windows to remind him to never, ever neglect his fall migration prep again.

Some optimistic and courageous green shoots appear through last year’s mulch only to be covered by an icy, brittle white in a surprise Nor’easter. Cold nights in the twenties remind us, “not yet – not yet.”

“Gather gladness from the skies

Take a lesson from the ground

Flowers do ope’ their heavenward eyes

And a Spring-time joy have found

Earth throws Winter’s robes away,

Decks herself for Easter Day.”       Gerald Manley Hopkins, “Easter”

Signs of spring are here though: the more stalwart robins are returning, fat and feathered thickly; some redwing blackbirds have shown up. Buds are swelling a bit on the early bloomers. We heard doves cooing yesterday evening. No goldfinches or yellow warblers have yet joined the sparrows, wrens, and cardinals at the bird feeder, but they’ll soon be here. Canadian geese are flocking up. Hundreds of them here on the island are now overhead one flight at a time, some already headed north to their summer breeding grounds. Not many sights are as beautiful as a large flock of twenty or fifty or a hundred geese honking in graceful, coordinated movement with their powerful wings beating the air tip to tip or in a final swooping glide into a winter corn field.

The most promising February harbinger is the opening of spring training: first pitchers and catchers, and a week later the boys of summer all show up. The Red Sox of the wonder years of Pedro, Manny, and Big Poppi have faded, and fans have retreated to the losing days of my youth. My father lived for sixty-six years and never saw a World Series win. But we are Sox fans in all weather. Some call it a mental illness, but there you are. Every spring hope and the greening rise in us, maybe to be dashed once again in September, but in February, there is only the joy of new beginnings. A couple of pitchers would help.

Late winter skies are startling blue, and the clouds look like they were painted with a pallet knife, almost unnatural. The sun is two months warmer than December, and with the windows up in the car the glare feels hot against our face. Hope is upon us, the promise of March and April unmistakable. Soon and very soon, the cascade of blooming will begin. First the crocuses, then the yellow profusion of daffodils and forsythia, followed by everything, the pink cherry blossoms, the white of the Bradford pears, magnolias, dogwoods, flowering crabs, azaleas, later the lilacs and rhododendron. The island’s splendor is persistent for months almost into autumn with the Montauk daisies.

Long, cold January and dreary February are intrinsic to the spring explosion of color and light. For me, it has always been and will remain a tradeoff well worth the price. Except for one year in Colorado, we have chosen to live our lives here in Massachusetts, Maine, and now in Rhode Island.  We’ve travelled the country and always come home. The wonder of it is in the profound changes of the seasons, majestically sequencing like a liturgical procession year after year.

We talk sporadically about moving somewhere south where the winters are not so demanding, and the cold is not so penetrating when the wind blows hard off the North Atlantic. But the discussions are never long. The loss would be unbearable.

“Let the earth bless the Lord.

Praise and exalt him above all forever.

Mountains and hills, bless the Lord.

Everything growing from the earth, bless the Lord.

You springs, bless the Lord.

Seas and rivers, bless the Lord.

You dolphins and all water creatures, bless the Lord.

All you birds of the air, bless the Lord.

All you beasts, wild and tame, bless the Lord.

You sons of men, bless the Lord.”  Canticle of the Three Children from Daniel 3: 74-81