Wait, January! Don't Go!!

I share this blog post knowing full well I may get hate mail, but I have to put forth my true feelings.

I'm sorry to see January go. Winter is "down" time for me. Time when I don't have two full-time jobs. All I have to handle (for the most part) in the winter is my inside work. Of a normal year, once the snow goes and the weather turns hospitable to the human body, I'm outside. Unfortunately, there is no one to pick up my inside work in the spring, summer and fall. So perhaps you can understand why winter allows me to feel as if I have more hours in the day in which to accomplish all I want to do.

I cannot believe it was a full month ago that I was taking down the Christmas tree and stowing the decorations away for another year. It seems like yesterday. What the heck happened to the last month? Regardless, I have to face the fact that what most people consider to be "the long, slow month of January" is gone.

Even way up here in northern Minnesota, February is the last true winter month. Although we can get lots of snow and blow in March, the days give us so much more daylight and in between the bouts of foul weather, we start to experience melting and the very beginnings of spring. So even though it might not always act like it, March is classified as more of a spring month than winter.

I personally wish February wasn't such a short month. Even though it's only a couple of days shorter than any other month, there is so much I try to pack in to it that it always seems to fly by. This year it's going to be a month in which I really have to hit the winter-wanna-do projects.

We're committed to finishing up the remodeling on our house in 2011 and although we've been working toward that goal all winter, there are so many things that are made more laborious and difficult when the wind is whipping and the temperature is hovering around zero. So even though we have been slogging along, I know as soon as better weather comes, we're going to be more and more involved with the tearing down, re-building and generally messy work of construction.

It's downright scary to me how fast life and times are going by. When you are in your thirties or forties or even fifties, it seems as though you have enough of your life left to accomplish . . . well, anything. It's all still possible because you have y-e-a-r-s stretching ahead of you. Not that I plan on croaking any time soon, mind you, but when you find yourself in your late sixties (good gawd, that's getting close to SEVENTY!) it begins to dawn that the time of your life is drawing nigh when you'd like to have all the "work" or "getting set up" done so that you can spend your retirement (ha!) years taking it a little easier or doing more of exactly what you want to do.

So I'm going to do my durndest to take full advantage of this last, wonderful month of winter. More sorting, cleaning and organizing to do. Time spent in my quilt studio. Plans yet to be completed for the remodeling. Many nights snuggled down reading with hubby in front of the wood stove. Cooking creative, nutritious meals using the canned, preserved and frozen treasures I put by at last harvest time. Expeditions on sunny days on snowshoe or snowmobile.

In honor of February, next time I go to town, I'm going to stop at the local florist's and splurge on a few red and white carnations to put in a vase with fragrant evergreen boughs. And it's time to bake heart-shaped sugar cookies to squirrel away in the freezer so they'll be ready to pull out, frost and give on Valentine's Day.

I'd better stop this chatter, get up off my duff and start doin'. Looks as though February is going to zip by just as fast as January did!