January is the longest month ever, the time of the year when April feels eons away, when we look out the window and see the cold, feel it, even indoors. It's a living thing, this first month, designed to make us forget everything except the hope that spring really will come this year.
It cannot come soon enough.
So, I work mightily to create spring indoors, filling every bare spot on floors and tables with plants that help me keep hope alive. Plants that bloom, like orchids and African violets, plants that evoke the warmer climes, such as palms, philodendrons and cactuses. And, for punctuation in this self-preservation, I make sure to spread around fragrant growers like jasmine and citrus.
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| A Cheerful Counterpoint to a Hard January |
Each morning, before much of the world gets cranked up, I take long tours through this indoor garden, put on a kettle of water for humidity and coffee, breathe in the damp earthiness of newly-watered plants and feel transported to fragrant, verdant spring.
Because ours is a small family, my wife Lyn, cat Bette and I can always find space for aloneness, even in our relatively small home.
When the snows come, and come, and come, as they have this winter, solitude reaches a higher level, approaching isolation. Our road, always little traveled, becomes virtually untraveled, more like an extension of the garden than a thoroughfare in the early morning after a big snow. All around the house and into the woods, the snow, a huge fluffy blanket, decorates trees, snuggles benches, caps stones and raises the level of the land to a height that beckons us to dive and wallow.
Eerily, during the really big winter storms, no sounds from anywhere get through our doors or windows, even when the occasional car or truck gingerly makes its way up the hill; sounds seem muffled by snow, frozen by cold. Snow-removal machines are seen but not heard.
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