February Sucks

Good thing February is short.  It’s my least favorite month.  There is the brief respite of Valentine’s Day, if you have a valentine.  If you don’t, February is even worse.  Winter, which can be a welcome break even here in the Midwest, has been experienced.  Christmas and New Year’s are over.  Snow has come and gone.  We’ve put up lights and trees and taken them down.  The parties are over.  We’re ready to move on to spring, which begins in March.  But there is February to live through, and February sucks.

I rode the Rock Island line to and from Joliet to LaSalle Street station, going into the city one day and returning the next. The days were carbon copies of each other.  Gray.  Cloudy.  Drab.  The snow had melted and revealed dead grass and trash under it.  No sign of life.  We’re ready for something to happen.  Anything actually.  We need a new view.  Reset the picture please.

My Christmas tree is lying in the yard, green but dead all the same.  It serves as a roosting place for birds waiting for the feeder.  I’ve fed more seed this winter than I ever remember.  The finches are killing the thistle seed and the Cardinals drain the black oil sunflower seeds.  Woodpeckers eat a cake of suet a week.  Maybe I’ve paid more attention this winter, and refilled the feeders more faithfully.  Where would they be without me?  In somebody else’s yard I’m sure.

There is art that appears in my head which I can’t shake.  When recurring tunes stick in our minds we call them ear worms.  What do we call images we keep seeing?  If we’re lucky the images are beautiful. 

Not all the art that visits my head is famous.  I think often of Claude Monet’s haystacks.  I’ve seen them in the Chicago Art Institute many times, making a point of visiting them each time I go through the doors.  Claude Monet made the ordinary gorgeous and these haystacks are no different.  Being an old haymaker myself I can relate.  A field, the sky, a haystack.  Sometimes two.  How can that be special you ask?  Claude has a talent for capturing beauty.  He paints them at different times of the day, through all the seasons.  Six of Monet’s many haystack paintings, held in museums around the world, are in Chicago.  They are displayed across their own wall in the Impressionists gallery.  Frame after frame of the same haystacks.

What changes you ask?  The light mostly.  The color of the sky.  The clouds.  The shadows they cast.  The winter haystack is softened with a coat of snow.  The spring haystack is spiked with green.  Once I stood across the room, when I can’t remember, to pick a favorite.   I scan them all and go closer to find the title of the winner.  Its Sunset, Snow Effect.  Soft with smooth lines, the sun glows orange off the clouds and the snow.  It’s pleasing and calm.

My least favorite?  I go back to look from across the room.  One stands out. Darker than the rest, less reflective light.  Solemn somehow.  I walk up once again to read the title.  Thaw, Sunset. 

I wish old Claude was alive, or I had the time and energy to research when those painting were done.  I’d bet my best animal skull (I have several in the shack) he painted that in February.  It’s what February looks like.  Not even a master like Claude Monet can make it better.

And so I’m leaving the country.  I’m going to see what February looks like further south.  I won’t be gone the whole month, but I won’t stay till the end either.  At the end of February I take off again.  Retirement offers opportunity, and I’m taking it.  I’ll talk to you again when I get back.

Look on the bright side.