What a lovely February we had this year, now departed and hardly remembered. Poetic, too!
This despite the chorus of complaints you heard day after day re the cold taking over around these parts, particular during the first half of that month. Meanwhile, the sun frequently danced, too, and gorgeously, on copious, powdery snow, and then sometimes even with it still out, there’d be a light falling of more white stuff, resembling pleasant gnats cavorting in the bracing air.
Yes, this was a poet’s delight, even an amateur poet (like yours truly)! In arguably the most gorgeous season of all? One could certainly make that case, I’d say, though many around here wouldn’t dare!
Of course as in life itself, nothing lasts, including these seasons at their height, like our oh so wintry Feb. ’26 (or most of it). That’s the way it works, always has and will, right?
I’ve talked before about art kept at arm’s length and spurned; and about other competing activities, such as compulsively checking cell phones, vs. noticing, feeling and savoring what’s gesturing before you. This has become a major problem in our techy world, or at least so saith this perhaps self-righteous sage.
I do admit that there was quite a difference between that earlier February (often 10 or even 4 out during the day, never mind at night!); and late Feb., more frequently at 34 and the like. Big difference…
But all of it still lovely winter, unless of course you somehow lack heat. On that score I’m as much a pampered wuss as anyone. I certainly want my visual, emotional cake, and to eat it, too, and with all comforts intact.
But yes, sometimes heat does go out, and then you appreciate how great scientific innovators helped master forbidding northern climes around the globe. Going back well before electricity and heating systems and the like, and even to invention of the button for coats (during the Middle Ages). A lot of people often take such amazing innovations for granted, me included.
So I do realize there’s a paradox here, a hypocritical inconsistency of sorts. Your idealistic, gossamer-sensitive columnist wants to savor these cold times of year in these parts; but also to stay reliably warm, right?
Try telling all that to Solzhenitsyn in HIS Februarys, hoping to survive another day in a frigid Soviet gulag with flimsy clothing and poor food to boot. Or to Elie Wiesel and the rest on a winter death march westward from Auschwitz to Germany, which killed off many emaciated souls in their thin prison garb.
Was I therefore a SPOILED, sensual imbiber of the environment during this past February? No question, and while copping to that charge, I also bow quite reverentially to the practical who know how to rig up generators and the rest. Or to install new hot water tanks, or to keep ice build-up from wrecking the gutters, all that.
But I still unregenerately dug that proud, copious snow piled up on forgetful ground, and the flakes dancing so irreverently and blissfully in pinging-cold air. Did, did, did…
Some of you, too? Or are you a slave to dire TV forecasts they so like to hurl at you during that time of year? (Which even this hypocrite tuned into as well!)
And hey, sometimes I myself welcomed a break in the action, one of those sloppy flaws where the demi-rain made war on all that pristine white stuff. But the February we had this year was still at its best when the alabaster-hued ice stretched far out on the mighty Niagara. Or when little tributaries, creeks, and ponds were shoveled away for makeshift skating rinks.
And when the air had that refreshing snap in it, and when… But I must stop myself, mustn’t I? Point already made: I did relish, savor, enjoy (almost as a traitor to some) this past, now evanesced Feb. ‘26. All fine again. as long as you’re wearing warm clothing, and the heat’s working at home or in one’s vehicle!
Give me the fish of cold and pretty, and the fries of well-heated garb and interiors? That’s where I was at this winter of ’26, at its most fetching in a truly poetic and fetching … February!