Topsy-Turvy Winter in Georgia

Winter. We lay quiet and brooding, even in the days that feel like spring, where we cannot trust that the cold will not harken back to us like a cruel joke. Christmas has come and gone, brightness in the midst of the dreary. The grass has gone dormant, the ivy stilled. A brief burst of warmth, and the camellia bushes sprout their pink clusters to the sky. The jonquils poke spikes of green from their beds to see if the time is ripe, or not. Jack Frost visits overnight and shrivels the green to ground. We pull out coats, hats, gloves. There's a mad dash to the store, to find a fleece that we will wear only a handful of times before fashion deems it defunct. Ahhhh, such is the season in the Southland.

My Yankee mother never liked the summers here. Us Georgia-acclimated children lived life outdoors, oblivious to the climes of other places. Visits to our northern relatives were places of wonder, where Santa Claus surely came from. Happy memories emerge: banks of snow and toboggan races down white hills with dear cousins. They had this, but we had the beach, only a few hours away. Summers meant sprinklers in the front yard or a pit stop to splash in the creek running next to the road. 

We liked to hop onto the crazy, half-wild horses in the pasture behind us and take them into the lake, where we used them like moveable docks in the water. Then we would lay in the sagebrush and dry off in the sun. On the way home, we would search for ripe muscadines, the warm, sweet juice bursting on our tongues. There were whole-day forays into the fields around for blackberries. My sister and I would bring home buckets of them for Mama to make cobbler. Flour, sugar, butter, milk and blackberries, where we would burn our tongues before the thing could cool off.  This was summer, when we tolerated the heat, when we knew no different, when there were no phones except the one attached to the wall. 

I'll take the winter, I will. To slowly rise and think about the past, the present, the future. To read, contemplate the universe, clean out the closets.  Spring will be here before we know it, with honeybees and pollen all around. But there's still February, the month they had to invent a holiday for, so that we wouldn't go insane. That one that never truly goes like we imagine it will. 

Alas, there's vacuuming to be done...