Are You In The Doldrums?

Whatever their parents thoughts,

when choosing their twin daughters' names,

I wonder that Ima and Urah

were thought appropriate choices

in the Hogg household.

_____

It is stranger than fiction. It's true.

Those seed catalogs are arriving almost daily in the mail. If you buy from those companies even once, you will have a yearly supply of accelerants for the fireplace as long as you live!

Driving by a bleak orchard yesterday after church, I noticed green grass looking "springish" without any snow cover. The green was green enough, and the grass was uniformly covering the otherwise bare ground enough, that it made me wonder whether or not the groundhogs have already seen their shadows.

I did drive past a home today where the front doorway was decorated on each side by a pair of large, red hearts I associate with mid-February and Valentine's Day. Did some family turn the wrong calendar page, or is some wishful thinking going on there, too?

It seems to me that this should be the time of year when most folks in the Northern Hemisphere experience the Winter Doldrums. I know I do.

If I was a bear, I would be perfectly happy to be hibernating for the next 100 days. But believing as I do that "life is a tunnel, not a cave" I am still up each day and moving around as if this season of the year is as normal as any other season would be without heat.

I have friends who go to Florida each winter so they can play golf all year long. I have other friends and family who attest to the therapeutic benefits provided by the ying and yang of taking short mid-winter vacations in Hawaii sandwiched between ski weeks in Utah and Colorado.

As for me and some of my brood, especially those with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), these mid-winter days of artificial light, ice, slush, and snow under fog and layers of temperature inversions with hazardous air and bare trees are what really makes spring seem outlandishly glorious.

I guess that, given the choice of seasons, winter does have at least one thing to commend itself.

Spring turns into the heat of summer. Summer turns into the real "new year" with the start of school. Fall turns into the cold of winter. But winter turns into that outlandishly glorious spring.

I can hardly wait, but wait I must.

____________

© 2017 Demas W. Jasper All rights reserved.