Hurry Up and Wait
When faced with the bleak dreary skies of January, it is easy to want to fast-forward into April when blooms start to appear in the garden again. Let me rephrase that. There are two faces of winter. One face is sun-shiny and snow blankets the countryside. The other gives you a side-eye, pelts you with ice pellets, and hides the sun behind thick, unmoving clouds for weeks. You'd never guess that I love winter. The local expression for this kind of snow is "Ithacation." It consists primarily of sideways snow and ice that nearly always finds a way inside your collar and into your ears. Every few years we are gifted with the Norman Rockwell "winters of year's past"... and the sky opens up, dumps feet of snow on us and then the sun comes out and everything is still for a brief moment. So how is one to deal with the interminable time between the rich colors of fall and the ebullient outbursts of color in spring? Around here, that can extend from November well i...