Reclaim the Days

As usual, I’m not an either-or sort of guy when it comes to favorite months or seasons. I, however, have a least favorite. The dead of winter leaves me cold, figuratively and literally. But here is my calendar in brief:

• At the end of winter, but before spring starts I get busy with tapping my maple trees for sap and spend long winter evenings boiling the ambrosia that is my family’s favorite sweetener.

• In early spring, I’m clearing winter’s mess away and hunting for the earliest spring flowers like the trout lily or sanguinaria. A bit further on I’m planting the garden.

• Throughout the summer I’m weeding, harvesting, and busy with all sorts of warm-season activities.

In the fall, I harvest and prep the garden for winter. By Thanksgiving I have made the Christmas fruitcakes and on Thanksgiving our family has lit the first holiday decorations.

• The holiday season really starts with Thanksgiving and extends through Christmas and till Three Kings Day. By around Martin Luther King’s birthday things fizzle out. Leaving us with the dead of winter and my least favorite, and I’m being kind here, time of year.

The “Dead Zone”

All the other times of the year have their own joy, grace, and even rapture to them. But not being an avid ski enthusiast, the period between about January 15th and almost the end of February is a sort of no man’s land. I spend lots of time in the fall filling lists of things I can do to make the dead zone livable. Pinned to the panel beside the computer is a list of things I’ve decided to try this year to ward off the horrible effects of the “Dread Season” or the “Dead Zone.”

It’s not the sort of thing you can easily escape. Can’t go to the barber shop and have a trim to remove it; can’t sleep through it, and I can’t afford to escape to a warmer clime to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

That’s what the list does. It’s the positive reaction to the negative dragging me down. Does it work? Some years are better than others. Not everything on the list works out. But that’s why there are so many. They are backup options.

For those who see this as a sort of rote survival routine, I’d point out that the maple syruping that I love so much was once on the list, and now it enlivens weeks that were once part of the dead zone. My goal is to reclaim the entirety of the year. Or if not, the entirety as much as I can.