I hate February.
It wasn’t even February when I realized that my loathing for the second month was in full swing. It was still technically January, but a foul February wind had uncovered my pumphouse, shifted the heat lamp, and nearly caused a disaster. Instead of causing a curse-worthy conflagration, the lamp just burned through a pipe. Trying to make the repair meant that the semi-permanent injury to my back awakened with full fury, causing my left leg to go out of control and send me to my knees in a puddle of mud.
February was working full force, and the pump simply would not hold prime. I fixed things that didn’t need fixing, just to be sure, and in the end gave up and contacted a friend who knew what he was doing—but it even took him longer than anticipated.
“I’m sorry it took so long,” he said. “It took me a good while to figure it out. I don’t know why.”
I could have told him why: February.
I despise February, with its fickle weather, politicians awakening from hibernation, and overall general malaise. February is like a toothache on a Sunday night before a minor federal holiday. It is the ingrown, infected toenail of months. A slinky, sneaky, slimy, snaky, slothful month that lends itself to run-on sentences and increasingly awkward alliteration that causes the mind to ache.
February is a glass of lukewarm, unsweetened, storebought tea purchased in a Northern fast food joint where nobody understands the word y’all.
— JW
Some native tribes called February’s insipid excuse for a full moon “The Bony Moon,” while others in both Northern Europe and pre-Columbian America called February the “Hunger Moon”. Everything is hungry in February, and if you like vittles the way I like vittles, it means you can never get enough, leading to a perpetual state of grumpiness.
Shoot, it’s not even a full month, and February is indecisive on top of that, unsure whether it’s 28 or 29 days. Every self-respecting month has at least 30. You’ll never convince me that the length of this semi-sloppy winter purgatory is to adjust for leap years and such, because I just hate February.
I am sure February was created by a Spanish inquisitor reincarnated as a Biden bureaucrat, whose sole job is to make people miserable.
February never knows for sure if it will rain, snow, sleet, or offer sunshine and tornadoes – or all of those in one day. I would like to think the schizophrenia is caused by nothing more than the inevitable changing of the season, but in my heart I am sure it a sociopathic need to wear down and demoralize all living things.
There are some good things about February: Valentine’s Day, the birthdays of my Sister the Troll and several friends I consider family. There’s Groundhog Day, too, although having to awaken in February of another pandemic year was just too much, and February killed one of the rodent prognosticators this year. I am confident that said Marmota Monax wouldn’t have died such a precipitous death were Groundhog Day in January or March, but no, it had to be February.
February, you repulse me.
Your perfidious, painful, pustulent presence is akin to the cousin that no one likes who shows up drunk and unshowered, at the family reunion, driving an unmuffled rusty Fiat, then hits on every girl there (whether or not they are married, over 18 or related to him) and bums gas money after begging a cigarette.
February is a month so repugnant that if it were a person and not a spindly, vermin-infested worm-belly of a month, the most corrupt of politicians wouldn’t even seek its vote.
February means my favorite fish are sleeping, most of the furs are too poor to make trapping worthwhile, and the small game is likely pregnant. February is when the coyotes are starting to shed, and smell worse than usual; it’s also their mating season. The fact that other coyotes are attracted to scraggly, skinny, stinking versions of themselves says a lot about the species.
February has all the charm of a broken jar of hungry, radioactive, zombie leeches.
Over the course of four days in one February, I experienced two wrecks, a tornado, a runaway fire, a broken heart and unemployment. Indeed, the wrecks, the broken heart, and unemployment all happened on the same day as the tornado. The fire came when I decided to clean up some storm damage behind my house, and the wind – because it was February – shifted. Instead of eating the overgrown vines, weeds and unidentifiable scrubby hardwoods, the blaze quickly spread across my yard toward my house.
February is the check engine light that never goes off, the seatbelt buzzer that malfunctions, the car stereo that only works on one side, so half the song is but a whisper as the other half deafens.
February is a spavined billy goat with one malevolent eye, sharp horns, muddy hooves, and a desire for destruction that would give Satan pause.
February is a glass of lukewarm, unsweetened, storebought tea purchased in a Northern fast food joint where nobody understands the word y’all.
But someday, eons from now, February will weaken and collapse like an inbred English king falling to the Viking warrior that is March.
March, beloved March, the Month of Fat Worms, the Month of First Grass Greening, the start of spring. March brings hope on its blustering winds, hope and dancing rabbits in the grass beside the lane and the first baby birds demanding breakfast in the nests in the crabapple tree and the hydrangea bush.
March brings babies of all kinds, blind, hairless squirrels screaming for milk; kittens learning to purr; calves and still-nursing goats flouncing in a pasture that is slowly, carefully, cautiously returning from a long winter.
March means dry days with sunspots when old dogs can sigh and lay in the yard, dreaming of glory days long past, and occasionally snapping at puppies who went from crawling to zooming in a matter of hours.
March means shoals of shad, and catfish shaking off the winter’s somnambulance to gingerly, carefully nibble at a smelly offering floating flirtatiously above the bottom of a flooding river.
March means old bones in old horses feeling a bit less stiff, giving an aged gelding the energy and desire to romp and frolic and buck about the pasture like the foals who have just learned the wonder of walking.
March means a good balance between daylight and dark, with indigo skies still sharp with cold stars but without the humidity that clouds the senses as well as the view in summer. Days are generally bright and sunshiny, although when it rains, Mother Nature seems to apologize.
March is a month of promise.
But before that promise can be kept, we have to get through February, the month I will hate most until August, but August’s insolence is a column for another day.
For now, I will withdraw deeper into my heaviest sweater, maintain a deathgrip on my coffee cup, stare out at a muddy, forlorn world, and feast on the fact that I hate February.
