January is drawing to a close

Tomorrow is the last day of January. I don't think I'll be sorry to see it go, although I will be sorry to see the weekend end. January and February are my 11th and 12th favorite months. I don't know which is in 11th and which is in 12th; maybe it's a tie. January has one happy holiday, and that's New Year's Day. That's still a day you spend relaxing with your family.

However, within a week or two, you can hardly remember what it felt like to have that warm, gezellig experience.

You're in the gray, drab workaday world.

And January is long.

What February has going for it is (1) it's short and (2) it's closer to spring than January is. So I guess January is my 12th favorite month and February is my 11th favorite. Just as winter is my 4th favorite season.

In March, I start thinking about going to local nurseries and buying baby plants, but I try not to. Local lore, as passed on to me by my dad, is that you're not safe from a freeze at night until after Mother's Day, which is in May. You don't want to spend a lot on plants that get killed within a few weeks by frost, although, well, that has happened to me. Maybe not that I spent a lot, but that I bought plants when it was too early to put them out. I hunger for them, in some kind of spiritual and aesthetic way.

Sometime in April, Lynden Christian School has a pancake breakfast fundraiser, and then some student group -- FFA? -- sells baby plants that day too. Last year the lady selling to me kept warning me that the plants I was buying were still "tender" and had to stay under cover. I kept them under the roof of the upper deck until it was safe to put them out further.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.

(Song of Solomon 2:11-13a)

We're not there yet, but we're on our way.