Jefferson Weaver • I Hate February

I hate February.

This is not news to those of you who have suffered with me through this miasma of a misbegotten misery of a month before. I will admit, there are a very few bright spots: birthdays of both blood kin and chosen family, Valentine’s Day,  the first of the jonquils and daffodils making their appearance, and –

No. Wait. That’s all. There’s nothing else.

February, how many ways can I describe you?

You are a worm-ridden, half-rabid goat with pointed horns, a bellyful of rotten sweet feed and a heart full of three or four active demons. You are a quisling, pettifogging politician belonging to the losing party, trying to steal scraps from the mouths of puppies and children. You are a fungal infection of the first order, which is why your name begins with F.

February, you are mud.

March may officially be known as the Month of Mud, but you, February, are the muddiest.  Not the warm, happy, healthy mud of a late spring day, squelching between the toes of a giggling child chasing frogs. Oh no. February, you are the mud that lacks the decency to completely freeze, mud full of foulness, piled deep with pollution and rife with sadness, grasping the feet of the unwary and pitching them face first into hidden rocks, broken glass, pieces of rusted metal infused with tetanus, and worse.

That happened to me the other day, and it wasn’t even quite February. It was, however, a January day with the spirit of February.

I tripped in the thawing mess left behind by that beautiful snowstorm. One of the few good things about being confined to a walking stick is that I have learned how to fall, if not gracefully, then at least in such a way as I can normally avoid injury. As I fell, I tried to catch myself with an outstretched arm (bent at the elbow to relieve some of the shock, of course.)

I knew even before my knees hit the soft ground what my hand was going to land in, and that didn’t make it any better. Lest we descend into bathroom humor, let’s just say it wasn’t mud, but a microcosmic example of all things February, digested and disposed of by one of my dogs. A big dog.

I loathe you, February.

You tease us with days where the temperature feels more like April, sunny and 75, then slam us with cold, desultory rain that would have made the most gothic of Victorian gothic novelists shudder. You tease us with the possibility of snow, then slap us with ice that causes people who can’t drive in good weather to get out and drive even more. You are the young woman walking down the street in a pretty dress, who when she turns around is cross-eyed, half-toothless, sneezes in your face and giggles like a broken blade cutting through sheet metal – and may actually be a man.

February is a time of frustration for the outdoorsman. Deer and bear seasons are but a pleasant memory, as are dove and waterfowl.  There are quail and rabbits if you can find them in huntable numbers, but squirrels have started having babies, so it’s not responsible to hunt them. Trapping season is still in, and the furbearers are still there, but their fur is worthless, with prime long since gone and winter poor kicking in with a vengeance. A $50 coyote in December might bring $8 in February, a $75 bobcat $15 – that’s if the fur buyer is generous and possibly impaired, a condition which has its merits when dealing with February.

February is hard on a coonhound and a coon hunter, as Procyon lotor just wants to be left alone in the hollow of a tree, sleeping away the month of misery that is February. That’s one good thing I can say about a coon, I guess. They have uncommon good sense when it comes to February.

Yes, the bass are on the bed, and the crappies are getting busy, but my beloved catfish are far more civilized, and are quietly waiting in the deep for spring. The chain pickerel are at least interested in whatever you can throw at them, but finding them is another story.

I detest February.

It was on a February day that I lost my girlfriend and my job in that order, then got into not one but two car wrecks while chasing a tornado. All before lunch.

Another February day, I was late leaving home for work and discovered I had a flat tire. The battery was dead on my backup vehicle, and of course both were a hundred feet apart. When I finally got them close enough for a jump start, one of the clamps broke on my brand new “professional grade” jumper cables. A very polite Trooper stopped me later to inquire why my tag was out of date.

February could make a statue of Martin Luther, if not Billy Graham, curse.

  February is feeble, bent, misshapen, misbegotten, and short, but sneaky. One could claim that February and its leap day are set up in such a way as to balance out the rest of the calendar, but I prefer to think that February flip-flops between 28 millenia of misery and 29 eons of torment because it is either vindictive or indecisive, or most likely both.

February is messy, miserable, malingering, malevolent, moldy, revolting, repugnant, repulsive, ridiculous, rotten, disgusting, disreputable, despised, delusional, disgraceful, slimy, slicktongued, sickening, suppurating, spoiled, and slovenly.

February is like the cousin-in-law that no one invites but somehow knows when to find the family reunion, where he eats all the best desserts, hits on all the pretty, underage female relatives, and leaves drunk with two grocery bags of takeout plates and five bucks someone loaned him for gas. He needed gas money since (depending on the year) he’s  waiting for his disability to start, his slip and fall settlement is yet to be finalized, or he’s holding out for a management position.

If February were a car, it would be a Yugo with rusted floorboards, a leaking gas tank, zipties for door handles, three slick tires, no muffler, no air conditioning, no heater or radio – and no insurance as it comes barreling toward the restored classic car parked in your driveway.

Yes, I have some problems with February.

But in a few weeks – long, painfully long weeks, but still just a few – the jonquils and daffodils will bravely burst free, their blooms challenging even a late March freeze. My birds will return to their nests on the front porch and under the eaves of the Chicken Castle, where a new flock of hens will worry and fret over new chicks and a rooster will challenge the dawn. Mystery the Barn Cat will have kittens, and we’ll have to crawl around finding the little hissing balls of fur. The puppies will be toddling and learning to howl, and start going to their new homes, where they can help complete someone’s family and enjoy adventures with their own children, as puppies should.

A couple of young women who are close to me will become new mothers in the first weeks of Spring, and we’ll celebrate the miracle of birth.

There will be Easter and warmer nights with the doors and windows open and turkey season and the catfish will stir again and hogs can still be hunted and the new garden and bouncing baby goats and old Tally the horse whickering and rolling in the soft spring grass that starts in March. There will be rabbits dancing in the moonlight, and downy little dinosaur heads sticking over the sides of nests fighting for food brought by worried robins and jays and mockingbirds. Baseball will return, overshadowing all those lesser sports.
There will be all those things and more as March wipes away the tears of February’s bullying and heartbreak, offering caresses of warm breezes and sunshine and sweaty, rolled up sleeves on a Saturday afternoon.

But first, we must survive February, that hated month.

At least it isn’t August.