I love winter

Oregon has been giving me my favorite type of winter for the past couple weeks: freezing cold with clear blue skies, reminiscent of the Connecticut winters I left behind almost four years ago. I welcome the cold. Filling my lungs with icy air makes me feel ALIVE. It’s the dark that makes me crazy. When it rains in Portland in the winter, which is often, even at noon the sky is pitch black. Reminds me of my favorite Wallace Stevens poem, though his version was gentler. He was writing of a Connecticut winter when he said 

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

In winter in Oregon, it is typically night all day, from the end of November until the end of February. But not this year! This year I am watching pastel sunrises, and remembering how beautiful bare trees can be. How I have missed tangles of branches spiderwebbing across blue skies. Doesn’t quite have the same effect against inky black.

I hope this dry January doesn’t put us in danger of a bad fire season later…

I see a lot of grumblings about the length of January. I don’t know what kind of Decembers you all had, but I needed two full months of January, maybe more, to recover. I’m actually kind of freaked out that February is Saturday. Am I healed? Have my gut microbes reset after all my holiday overindulgence? Have my emotions finally calmed the fuck down?

Am I ready to actually begin the year?

Most importantly, have I gotten my own physical and emotional health to a strong enough place that I can start focusing my energy outside myself? I’m afraid my soup-filled hibernating days of yore are privileged and numbered. There’s a new horrible world forming out there and there’s work to be done.

This sunshine will give me some much-needed energy.