I may be the only person I know who really digs the month of January. Where most folks see a month of cruel bone-chilling winds and Christmas bills arriving in a blizzard, I see a time of rest and reflection, the gift of a moment to withdraw and take stock and mentally regroup, as my equally hard-working wife likes to say.
In short, like Mole and Badger from Wind in the Willows, it’s my burrowing month.
Come January, I’ve almost always just finished work on one book and am pondering the start of work on another — emphasis on pondering.
This is, after all, my lovely self-imposed exile-from-the-world month, the time I stay close to the hutch and read books I’ve had stacked up for months (unable to read another writer’s work for fear I’ll confuse his voice with my own), drink gallons of real hot chocolate, take walks, take naps, watch my favorite movies for the umpteenth time, and try my best to to keep the mum’s freezing feet warm in bed.
The pleasure’s all mine, as I’m something of a human hot water-bottle, the effect of being a child of winter, I suppose, naturally immune to cold and insulated for warmth. Possibly because I hail from a wintry clan full of January births — including both parents, and I just missed being born into the month by thirty-one hours — I love wool blankets and cashmere sweaters, rag socks, tweed jackets, good boots. I could easily pass the whole month of January dressed only in jeans and flannel shirts. Have done so many times, in fact.
When we lived on a forested hill in Maine, moreover, there were entire stretches of January days when I ventured no farther than a hundred paces from our porch — to shovel walks or top up the wood pile or simply walk a fifty-pound bag of sorghum feed to the stone wall at the rear of our property where I fed a local family of white tails on frigid nights. One January, a freak ice storm knocked power out for half the state of Maine, and I lived by candlelight and tended my wood stove for close to a fortnight, falling into the routine of a Victorian woodcutter. I cooked, read, and turned in before eight o’clock most nights. Once the roads in my rural end of the county were cleared of downed trees, which took at least a week, I ventured out to restock the pantry with canned soups and was amused to come home and discover, of all things, a crew from Duke Power working on my ridge’s downed powerlines. They’d been flown in by the governor of Maine to help, and we had something of a Carolina reunion.
It was intriguing to visit the 19th century — a real eye-opener as to what we moderns simply take for granted — but I’m in no hurry to go back there anytime soon.
In a happier context, I’ve had beautiful bright January days where, burrowed in, I don’t speak to another soul or even hear the sound of my own voice, always a plus, and solitary nights when the only sound that disturbed the deep winter silence mantling the earth was the welcome crack and pop of that same woodstove. If there’s a better place to sit and read and doze off than by a window leaned on by the benediction of midwinter afternoon sun, I simply don’t know it. Navy bean soup tastes better in January. So does real steel-cut oatmeal, buttered toast and good Scottish tea. Some people starve themselves in January, hoping to kickstart a transformation. My choice is to feed the soul with things that stick to your ribs.
During the first full year of my married life, we lived on an island off the Maine coast where all but the postmistress, the geezers who gathered every morning for coffee at the island store, and maybe a dozen lobstering families braved the sharpest edge of winter. Our little house looked out over Mackerel Cove, and I came to treasure my afternoon walks around the island shore with my dog, Amos, a Vermont golden retriever who rejoiced in the coldest days. After a morning of work at my computer, a bracing walk was just the thing to clear my head and get the blood moving.
Even better, on a clear January day from the seaward end of Bailey’s Island, one could see all the way to Portland thirty miles across Casco Bay — especially around dusk, when the sea turned cobalt blue and the western horizon was lined with brilliant orange and crimson, and the first lights of the city winked on.
My wife at the time was pregnant with our first child. Before Christmas that year I began working on a fictional tale about the colorful inhabitants of a magical island where the peculiar residents serve as custodians of beloved lost items from all corners of the world, keepsakes and treasures from near and far that either washed up on shore or were brought to the island for proper caretaking by a mysterious sea captain named Skelton. I called it “The Island of Beautiful Lost and Found Things” and by the shank end of a curiously snowless January I’d finished about half the tale when I took my very pregnant wife to supper in town.
Real Mainers, like Amos the dog, thrive on the coming of snow, but the snowless winter had caused real consternation back on the island. Buckets of sand were sitting at the ready by the village market door, and Bob the island’s defacto snow-plow boss had been idle all winter.
Just as we began to eat, though, my wife pointed out the window and smiled. It was suddenly snowing like crazy, piling up to beat the band. The waiter became giddy, the cook even stepped out to look. A lost winter had been found! The hospital was only a block away. The jubliant admitting nurse asked me how it would feel to have a son on the day of the winter’s first big snowstorm. She was certain we’d have a winter baby boy by morning.
In fact, by dawn’s early light the storm had blown itself out to sea, and we had a baby daughter we named Maggie Sinclair after her Southern and Scottish grandmothers.
It was, without question, the happiest day of my life.
As I was driving home to the island to shower, feed the dog, and phone my anxious parents here in North Carolina with the big news — this was years before I owned a cell phone — I happened to be passing the most beautiful farm on the coast road, its shoulders now two-feet-high with pristine white snow, when a large red cat dashed across the road in front of me. I swerved hard, sliding sideways, but struck the cat, which still managed to leap the far bank and bound off through the knee-deep snow.
I pulled over and followed its tracks and found the big old tom curled up at the base of a sprawling hemlock on the hill. He’d already expired from either shock or internal injury. In a bit of shock myself, I picked him up and carried him back down to the road and crossed over to the field and waded up the long unplowed driveway to the beautiful farmhouse, where I knocked on the door and waited, looking at the transformed world around me and thinking how life gives and takes, often with equal measures of joy and sadness.
When the door opened and the mistress of the farm saw me with her cat in my arms, she didn’t appear terribly surprised, though her eyes quickly filled with tears. I apologized and explained how I tried my best to miss him and she explained how old “Roger” loved to venture up to the hilltop across the road, even after massive snowstorms. “He’s been hit at least twice in his life. I’m just happy you brought him home. We’ll put him in the barn and bury him in the spring.”
I went on home and phoned my folks, had my shower, made coffee and stood on my snowy deck with Amos the dog, looking at the city of Portland in the distance, on my first morning as a father, feeling my own eyes water from cold and emotion. Then, passing the farm, I drove back to the hospital, went in and held my new born, new found, daughter.
Baby Maggie’s arrival in a January snowstorm was the talk of the island for several days, sparking genuine excitement in the village. Neighbors brought food and little gifts. The postmistress gave me a knitted cap with tiny whales on it. The geezers at the island store bought me coffee and offered to take Baby Maggie for her first lobster boat ride. Bob the snowplow boss kept plowing our road out just to make sure.
Our island baby turns twenty-three on the third to last day of this month.
For some reason — probably my sadness over accidentally killing old Roger — I set aside the story of beautiful lost and found things and never got back to finishing it.
But this year, as I’m burrowed in, I may finally do that. I’ve lived long enough to know we all must journey through a world filled with beautiful lost and found things — people, animals, objects of the heart — and whatever we think we’ve lost is really only an illusion.
Given enough time and patience, and a chance to remove oneself to an island of healing solitude, perhaps it will all come back again. PS
