February

If one word can be used to describe an entire month’s worth of happenings and emotions, I think February’s word is soup.  Oh, short-long month of pots bubbling on the stove, and slushy muck on the yard outside, I am not so sorry to see you go.  We had good times, yes:
Chilly evenings warmed through with a lovely potato, leek, and dill soup with a side of drop biscuits and homemade jam.  Foggy mornings that reminded me of former ocean- front New England living, and longing for just-a-moment for those old places.  Sunsets that beckoned us to leave the shades open until the last blushing rays of sun were drowned in twilight.  Lovely snowfalls caught in the pools of light beneath our streetlamp.  Familiar hikes to old, sacred haunts that began in dappled sunlight and ended in tiny blizzards and rosy cheeked babes.  Hot cocoa and Fig Newton picnics in the winter-abandoned park bandstand, testing our voices on a stage we would not otherwise sing on.  Sunday mornings and second breakfasts.  Extra trips to the compost pile, with the whisper of spring’s promise just barely audible on the wind if you but stopped and bent to listen.  And always, always soup on the stove, in a big pot, with a side of strong coffee.
We worked, in these February days, to keep our bodies busy and our minds off of, and yet into, winter.  It is both an embrace and a shrugging off.  While winter spins and swirls outside, inside of our home and our hearts there has been a building anticipation of what is yet to come.  There are so many, many plans being made for both these weeks ahead and also the years down the road.  It is funny how much you can plan while lingering over a bowl of steamy soup, and how much excitement can be had over the making of such plans.  It can be exhilarating and giddy and scary and silly and maddening, a veritable soup of emotions.  But with each idea we place with ink on paper the further we get from meager traces of hope, and the closer we get to real, honest-to-goodness action.  There is power in the planning of good things. 
And so, on to better weather and longer days, out of the foggy-soup dreams of February and into the intense planning for those spring-times that are coming faster than we could have hoped for three weeks ago.  Yes!