Unexpected Warm Winter

I need winter for writing.

This is a warm, dry January day and I am sitting on the porch with alpha dog Rudy in my lap as I would on a summer day, soaking in sun rays and making vitamin D in a month when I usually hide indoors. The gushing of water through the narrow creek bed and the soft roar of a breeze through the stick trees are punctuated by the repetitive flap of the flag and the click of its clips against the pole.

Stella, Clara's frisky small dog, whines to play fetch but I am writing and reading and stroking another dog. Bandit, preferring a lookout perch hides in the upstairs study. Dogs don't want me to write. This sunny day should be for playing.

It doesn't feel like fall or spring, just a strange winter day with flies buzzing and bulbs pushing green spears through soft ground. "It is JANUARY," I want to shout. A soaring crow mocks me. "Ha….Ha...Ha, ha, ha."

Only the evergreens are glossy and rich with color. The hills are brown. But the cherry tree at the end of the stepping-stones reaches for April. I hope the sap isn't rising. My fear is that its buds will be nipped and we won't have cherries in July.  And there are the apples, pears, blueberries and hickory nuts. So much is at stake, beauty…and sustenance. Even migratory birds can be fooled, and if they come too soon, their food supplies and habitat will be altered.

Oaks are never fooled, nor peonies. Locusts appear to be so dead that I want to cut them down for fence-posts. Several years ago, in autumn, Traylor cut five and stripped the bark for posts on the cottage porch. Last year, he cut more to make an arbor out back. It seems no one mourns a felled locust tree.

We've had more rain than usual, so if it were colder, we would be buried in snow and I would be wishing for spring and whining about how hard it is to get out. But I know it's just talk. I love the change of seasons and the mood each brings. For me, the sights and sounds, the textures and scents of each season feel like the essence of life, a necessary cycling.

So I will relish this unexpected gift, grateful for the frisky dogs that are causing me to get up and walk the mile to the mailbox and back, savoring the scents along the way of mud and damp straw and leaves, the warming needles on the spruce and pines. I will bare more of my arms to the sun and squint and sweat on the uphill climb. I will live the life that is in me.

I can always write when winter comes.