On January

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."
 ― T.S. Eliot

It’s January. So we get to start all over. January arrives about ten days after the winter solstice. We have only just begun the trudge through the doldrums and even though it’s cold outside, in the Texan sense of the word, there’s this Springy sense of new beginnings about January that I love. When January arrives, we stand still for a moment. We allow ourselves to pause before pushing onward and acknowledge the fresh start our calendar affords us. It’s a new year, a new month, a new semester. Students go back to school. If it were thirty years earlier, I would be cleaning out my locker, my book-bag, my purse. Now I clean out my closet, my garage, my email.

January hosts birthdays for my ex-husband, a good girlfriend, my dog, Elvis, and Martin Luther King. It is the month I have made and broken many a resolution, the month that holds the one day a year I am guaranteed to be awake past 10:30. Maybe.

January sounds like the countdown to midnight and my sister laughing. It looks like my children under the glow of fireworks and sparklers. It smells like aging Christmas trees and black eyed peas and cabbage. 

It represents for me newness, a blank slate, the hope of perhaps a no-school snow-day, a longing for the last freeze of winter and warmer days to come. I can imagine the outline of summer, my favorite time of year. In spite of my disgust with temperatures below 75, this year, I welcome you, Cold Winter. This year, I will be so bold as to say Yes to you and happily trudge through your days.

Yes, winter. Welcome.