The Joys of January

When my children were small, we used to host Christmas. For a week or two every December, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and their dogs gathered under our roof. One notorious year there were twelve people and nine dogs in the house. The dogs included, in addition to our two, my mother’s Lhasa Apso and my father in law’s tiny nondescript mother dog and her litter of newborn puppies, whom he hadn’t had the heart to leave in a kennel. The days were an endless round of meals and games and laundry and more meals, and wondering when our wonky well would run dry, which it did periodically, forcing the twelve of us to be as conservative about water as a tribe of nomads wandering in the desert.

And then it was over. The guests and their canine companions would depart, my husband would go back to work and the girls to school. And once the last batch of sheets had  been washed and dried and the wrapping paper thrown out (this was the seventies, before we felt compelled to save the planet by hoarding every scrap of reusable paper), I was left in solitary splendor. It was cold outside—in those days, we often had snow in northern Maryland. The garden was taking a break until spring, and my only outdoor duty was to feed and water the hens and the two goats, who were pregnant and so didn’t need to be milked. The dogs, emotionally spent by the celebratory chaos, snoozed all day in front of the fire. And until school let out in the afternoon I was free to write and read, and stare out the window.

I didn’t get a lot of staring-out-the-window time back then, which is why I was so devoted to January. The college where I taught gave me the option of teaching an extra course in the spring in exchange for a class-free January, and I always took it. During those thirty days I would, like a bear fattening up for the winter, accumulate the energies that would see me through the spring semester, the birth of the goat kids, the start of the gardening season, and even the following Christmas.

Those heroic Christmases are long gone, and the demands of life, which once felt like a tsunami threatening to drown  me, now merely lap gently about my ankles. The desperate trips to the mall, squeezed in between two classes, to find gifts for everyone have been replaced by leisurely pointing and clicking at the computer. Having passed the turkey baster to the next generation, my husband and I are now guests instead of hosts, fed and feted and forbidden to exert ourselves.

Yet I still love January. The December commercial frenzy takes a momentary pause before gearing up for the hearts-and-flowers excesses of February. The days are already a few minutes longer, and the sunlight (when there is sunlight) reflected off the snow makes it so bright that the lavender that I’m trying to winter indoors has put out a couple of hopeful new shoots.  The winter birds only come to the feeders morning and evening, and keep themselves to themselves the rest of the time. If it weren’t for the crows and the occasional chickadee, the silence would be total. But the squirrels are out in force. It’s their mating season, and from dawn to dusk they chase each other, spiraling up and down the tree trunks, oblivious to the cold and having orgies in the canopy. Otherwise, it’s a quiet, empty time, both outdoors and in—a time for staring blankly out the window, and for looking inward as well.