The beauty and beast of January
Connie’s Corner
As a child, I never cared much for January. Being as excited as I was about Santa and everything Christmas, January was a major letdown even before such a thing as “post-Christmas blues” was identified. Decades later, January remains not one of my favorite months, but I’ve come to find the beauty in this, sometimes beastly, month of the year.
From my pint-size point of view, January was a miserable month. Fading cameos in my mind are of bitter, gloomy cold days, gas heaters with ceramic grates and being confined indoors. My mother was a voracious reader and not predisposed to outdoor activities other than walking so I don’t know if she minded it as much as I did but she did have to contend with my unhappiness and whining…and trust me, I did whine!
As a student, January meant the beginning of the final chapter of the school year and last opportunity to redeem myself from all those Cs in conduct I received from talking in class, but as a “walker,” it meant cold legs and cold noses.
Back in the 50s, girls were allowed to wear jeans or long pants to school only on Go Texan Day or if the temperature hit freezing. I can probably count on one hand the number of times when I wore pants to school because of weather. Almost everyone in my elementary school walked to school then – rain, sleet or the occasional historic snow. In introspect, thank God, at least this was Texas and not Michigan!
One of the worst Januarys I’ve experienced was January 1976. Because of my husband’s job, our family had transferred back home to Texas from Colorado just in time for Thanksgiving less than two months earlier. Right after the holidays, all four of my children came down with an intestinal virus. They were eight months, barely 2, 5 ½ and 8 ½ years old. The virus went through each child one-by-one like Sherman’s march to the sea. To be blunt, if it wasn’t one end, it was the other and sometimes both at the same time and sometimes two children at the same time. It was particularly scary caring for an infant who could easily dehydrate before the days of Pedialyte.
We couldn’t afford a diaper service or even Pampers for the two youngest, so I spent my days wringing out diapers from two diaper pails (YUK!), washing, drying, folding as well as washing, drying, folding sheets for two cribs and two beds – over and over and over again. When the bug had run its course with my children, guess where it landed next? I didn’t get my Christmas tree taken down until March that year!
Eventually, I rejoined the workforce as a working mom and January served to bring normalcy back to my routine both at work and at home after the holidays. I have to confess that nowadays it seems to take just a little longer to readjust and get back in the groove again.
My overall negative opinion of January was challenged from an unexpected source – during my former drive to work from Bedias to Bryan. Many early January mornings traveling SH 90, I found myself overcome by the stark beauty of the bare trees against the sunrise, especially when there was a layer of frost blanketing the pastures. It seemed to glisten!
This naked display, so to speak, revealed homesteads and cabins in places I didn’t know existed. The lush spring vegetation had provided a privacy cover, but now they sat exposed by January’s leafless trees. The highway wasn’t heavily traveled back then, and this “reveal” added pleasure to a drive I normally dreaded.
As I sit here writing, it’s rainy, gloomy, windy, and colder than I like outside, but I’ve come to terms with the month. I think of January as the beauty and the beast. It’s death. It’s renewal, and it’s revealing if you’re eyes and mind are open.
Connie Clements is a freelance reporter and award-winning columnist. She writes feature news articles on a weekly basis and an opinion column as the mood strikes her.