January

Is it me?
Or is January the longest month?

It has for most of my adult life been the month I feel trapped in, most of my adult life having been here, in Idaho. That means where winter actually happens. Real winter every year is hard on me, a Californian still, where twice in my life we had snow in December, snow that fell for maybe half an hour and melted as it hit the ground. Snow in Santa Monica. It's all we could talk about for a few days.

Here in Idaho winter is real and quite relentlessly annual.

In Boise just now we are all trapped under a dark January cloud; it's called inversion. If you go up to Bogus Basin or some other mountain top, you can be in glorious blue sky. You can look down on the inversion from above it.

But we live down here in the valley. I do.

I know about SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and maybe I have a little of it, because those sunny, blue-sky days cheer me, even if it's cold. I watched the Rose Bowl and loved Pasadena's blue, blue sky. Longing for home? Maybe so.

It isn't the weather entirely, of course, because I am usually free to leave my home, as opposed to being snowbound. It just feels long and cold and like any movement requires much more effort than I can make. Days are short, nights long. Lots of thinking and remembering at night. Lots of feeling stuck. Besides, it's Wayne. He died in January. And I can't help what anyone says about "his time" and "better places" and being happy anyway, which I often am, his death is hard to bear.

Do we have inversions in February? You'd think I would remember, but I don't. Well, even if the weather gets inverted, I'm always glad to get on with the year, so to speak, and move into February. Move away from this month.