I don’t know about other people but it takes me a long time to turn around after Christmas. The preparations we expend so much energy on for the year-end’s celebrating are supposed to give thrills of wintry anticipation but it’s rare now to have the weather go hand-in-hand with them. A possible day of flurries early in the month here, a minor cold snap there… Last year we had a white Christmas but this year it was on a day like spring, which doesn’t always bother me because spring can be seen as kind of a Christmas theme. A foggy Englishy Christmas Eve is traditional enough to give some of the feel, but neither satisfy as does a snowfall. I hate it just after December when the lights are all down but all of a sudden the snow comes. What’s the point of that- since the whole thing is about light it makes sense to keep them up for awhile into the year. And so much has to be done before that last week that after the big days are through one can feel a real it’s-all-over letdown. Yet winter, the season, has hardly begun.

Now it’s mid-January, and the blast is upon us. We’ve had a little snow, and up north the slopes are recovering nicely. We’re headed for an arctic freeze. What makers us feel so welcoming to spring when she arrives? That we’ve really had the cold- and the open time that it offers, for things like a few weeks of re-organising. Throwing out. Back to practicing exercises- if you have played in holiday concerts, as I did this year, all that atmospheric music is put away. Big projects one hopes to have gained some progress on- seeing whether something warrants the effort to put new life to it. Still-to-dos that have been on one’s mind for years along with hopes of checking each one off to go into the new expanse of time cleared of the chronic undone-ness of them. Things to review one doesn’t feel one should waste other seasons on- whether a sweater repair or a treatise- just to feel you finished them up. The problem is, I could use a whole year of winter nights for all I want to accomplish- and by the third week one feels January has already flown by.

What gives a sense of it’s being winter? Well snow of course if you have it- but really, I think, cold. Early darkness, too, but the element that really brings both the sense of the season and with it all the iconic elements of this time to counter it- firesides, soup bubbling and cookies baking, books received as gifts just a few weeks ago to be read in snuggly situations- is the cold.

And- birds- our neighborhood birds trying to survive it. Watching them, counting them, feeding them, drawing them, sitting by the kitchen window to draw them. We get to really see them. In December we heard a GHO mating pair right by the side of the house. Today the feeders are out for the first time. Here’s today’s list, in order of appearance-

• American Robins
• European Starlings
• House or Purple Finches or both Blue Jays Cardinals- pair Black-capped Chickadee Song Sparrow Red-bellied
• Woodpecker Goldfinch
• Carolina Wren
• Tufted Titmouse

And of course, the obligatory Squirrel

These are our usual suspects- all back the moment the grub’s out!

Frozen branches squeak in the wind tonight- a true winter’s night.
Word of the day: Qualium: The sensation of color