winter blues

JANUARY

january is a bad hat. pilly, the knit loose and thin. the hat is glued to the head of the year and if you want to pull it off, you can’t, but another hat doesn’t fit on top.

this is so dumb.

THE DEAL

the new president thinks climate change is a hoax. i think the new president is a hoax. climate change thinks the new president is a joke. so far, uncharacteristically, january agrees with everything—but neither of us thinks it’s funny.

TELEPHONE

did you call? i saw that you called.

then why are you asking?

i guess i just wanted to point it out.

then why didn’t you just point it out?

i just did.

AVALANCHE

january is a slow, sad person who rams their shopping cart into the tea display and knocks the whole thing over. when all the boxes of tea topple down in a little avalanche, january just stands there watching, sadly, and nobody comes to help. instead of picking up the boxes, january just turns and skulks away, head down. leaves the cart there, with a few piddling things inside that don’t matter.

THE FOX

dear ali,

i’ve dispatched my fox—maybe you’ve seen him? in fact i’ve lost track of him. i have, in fact, seen him. just the other day i saw him, in the middle of the afternoon, crossing the street near my neighbor’s house. he had a squirrel hanging out of his mouth like a peeled-off sock with a lot of tree-colored hair stuck to it. i know i haven’t been the nicest month this year. or any year? i know you curse my name at times. well, that’s a little drastic. i know you’ve been taking baths and drinking tea and i know you have a sunshine lamp on your desk. all true. what i’m writing to tell you is this: i’m just doing what i’m supposed to do. i’m doing my best. and then (this is my favorite part of the letter), january quotes john muir (!!): “when one tugs at a single thing in nature,” a friend of mine once said, “he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” here’s the thing: i have an important job to do. just like the fox has a job, the sun has a job, and you have a job. and what is my job here, exactly? please don’t begrudge me trying to do a good job. i’m just being myself. at the end of the day, that’s all any of us can do.

yours,

january

SKY

finally, it snowed. hallelujah! i snugged into my little cross-country ski boots, laced myself up, stuffed my pockets with tissues, and me and the dog tromped into the woods, the skis balanced on my shoulder like twin pickets. when we got there, i realized every tree was encased in ice. while we skied, i cracked the frozen drips off the branches with my lanky poles as we passed, popped them in my mouth like winter beads. at the top of the hill, we sat on a rock and ate snowballs, which the dog thinks are fantastic delicate treats i make like magic from the frozen-frosting ground under her winterpink paws. we gazed out over the city, then the lake, to the mountains beyond it. the sky was up there somewhere, we could see little parachutes of it patching the mountains, white teeth of its light chattered across their divots and dives. down in the lake, the fish were asleep in a long blue nap, dreaming of july. january twinkled its eyes from the ice-twigs everywhere, melted in our bellies and came into a different kind of focus, slipped into a warm picture of itself as someone else.

NOTE

QUICKEN |ˈkwikən | verb

1 make or become faster or quicker: [with object] : she quickened her pace, desperate to escape | [no object] : I felt my pulse quicken.

2 [no object] spring to life; become animated: her interest quickened |
(as adjective quickening) : she looked with quickening curiosity through the glass doors of the library. • [with object] stimulate: the letter’s words—sunshine, fox, self—suddenly quickened her own memories. • [with object] give or restore life to: they thought she was gone, but her body was suddenly quickened. • archaic (of a woman) reach a stage in pregnancy when movements of the fetus can be felt. • archaic (of a fetus) begin to show signs of life. • [with object] archaic make (a fire) burn brighter.

A DREAM

i have a dream where january is knitting in a rocking chair by a giant fireplace and tells me what to do. “wear soft clothing,” it says, “and read books, books, books, climb through the pages and pages of books into the nineteenth century into the english countryside where jane eyre saved a man’s heart from freezing inside of him and expanding and breaking him apart like falling through a skating pond, solitary in a ring of thick evergreen trees, fast asleep and full of january.”

“how do you know about that?” i demand, snuggling down further into the blankets.

january smiles and shakes its head, which sounds softly like a century’s icicles clattering together, pauses mid-rock like a brown leaf suspended in a winter ditch, arches one white eyebrow like sailing a snowball at me in an icy arc. “escape,” it says, “was invented by january.”

TELEPHONE

i called january on the phone.

did you call me? january says.

no, i say.

you did, says january, you just called me.

okay, i did, i say.

what do you want? january says.

i don’t know how to say this.

your hat, i say. i need you to take off your hat.

can’t, january says.

just can’t? i say. that’s it?

that’s it, says january, and hangs up.

THE WASH

i have to carry tissues everywhere i go. yesterday i nearly broke the washing machine with them because i forgot they were balled up in a rumpled clump in the pocket of the old snot-sleeved sweatshirt i was finally washing. after the rinse cycle, i fished out the clothes, which were like small wet blankets, using my arms like fishing poles and my hands like clumsy cold hooks. the wadded up bits of tissue spangled the wet clothes like slushy rocks of snow. every time i sneeze, a river of muck bubbles out. i blame january.

THE WORLD

january puts a sign up on a sandwich board outside The Public Library:

COLD? COME GET A BOOK! YOU’LL STILL BE COLD BUT YOU’LL HAVE A BOOK

it reads like a challenge. i can feel one of january’s cloudy eyebrows lifting, watching me carefully from its strategic position (Everywhere). i decide to take a detour to see what it’s all about.

there are two sets of doors to get inside The Public Library.

the first set (IN/OUT) is to slow january down. the doors are heavy and smudged all over, january having pressed its nose up against it too much, having breathed across it in an attempt to unsettle the library patrons with its incessant whooshing and long crusts of salt and dirty paw prints on the sad welcome mat of winter. there are two glass panels on each door, one on top and one on bottom. in the middle is the iron handle, which january keeps in the freezer all night and proudly presents to the sleepy town in the morning. (having come from a warm dream with woodsmoke and hot city council cocoa and little marshmallows of good ideas floating like tentative buoys, nobody appreciates it and january often feels slighted.) someone blew their hot breath on january and you can see it on the bottom panel of the IN door where a crooked heart has been drawn with a wooly, mittened thumb.

anyway, once you get past all that, there is a resting area before the second set of doors (IN/OUT) to get to The Public Library. the second set is to keep january OUT. between the first and second doors, in the resting area, there are rugs (january doesn’t love rugs), vents that breathe hot breath down from the corners of the high walls (january actually gets smaller if walloped thus), and a large bucket filled with salted soil and a yellow plastic shovel. the man who uses the yellow plastic shovel has a voice filled with sand and string, and he wears a bright orange vest over a parka big enough to fit january inside once and keep it out twice. the resting area even has a long bulletin board along one wall. the bulletin board is colorful, and colored paper is one thing that works on january like garlic works on a vampire. i’ve heard (and it may be an urban myth, hard to say for sure) that if you wear squares of colored paper strung around your neck with plain string OR if you decorate your house with such squares by stringing them from corner to corner and especially along the tops of the windows, it will keep january OUT. january only likes grayish-whitish, sometimes with a little blue or weak yellowish (like old, watered-down dandelion tea) mixed in.

i make it past the first set of doors.

i rest in the resting area like i’m supposed to, just to be sure january didn’t sneak in behind me past the heart-mitten window.

while i’m resting, i read the bulletin board like i’m reading a subway map

YOU ARE HERE

the bulletin board says. i feel safe with all its colored squares of feathery paper, which overlap and jostle for position like peacocks in a crowded flowerbed. where did i come from? i wonder.

happy feet! one peacock shouts, therapeutic dance workshop! she hops from side to side, shimmering her tail feathers theatrically.

i look back through the first set of doors (OUT/IN) to double check that january didn’t make it to the resting area: it didn’t.

across the street, someone has scrawled in lime green spray paint across one of january’s sad, old, dingy-looking brick buildings: save the world. i nod once at january, who stands between me and save the world like a grumpy crossing guard, before heading through the second set of doors and into the warm palm of The Public Library.

i made it! now i can really see what it’s all about.

“good morning,” the Head Librarian sings from the circulation desk. she has curly many-shades-of-gray hair with ribbons of bright white clouds twirled through and wears thick, round glasses that magnify her eyes gigantically. all around her, letters and short, dull-pointed pencils are swirling in slowly in wide hoops like halos with libraries for heads. strung from here to everywhere are more squares of paper. the card catalog spreads itself out across the stacks, infiltrating everything like a scent. the Head Librarian has a plum-colored nametag pinned to her canary yellow cardigan: MARJORIE. i smile sweetly, wearing my sweet victory in a healthy winter flush: january is distinctly missing from the scene like an ellipsis. MARJORIE smiles back with big, lovely teeth, old-paper-white. books beat everywhere like little hedged-in hearts, warm and quiet and full of stories.

“i was just looking for the poetry section?” i say.

“Poetry!” MARJORIE sings. her voice is like an april bird in a tunnel filled with near-flowers, and clinks against the library like a dessertspoon to a teacup, inviting poetry to kiss the other sections, such as photography, or travel writing. “third floor, north wing— by the windows.”

“thank you,” i say. she beams at me, her hair like a whisping ring around the moon, then returns happily to her work.

as i drift through the library toward the stairs, which twirl through the center like a maypole, i notice Two Things. the first is a fat man in a soft chair, reading a tiny book about sailing. the man does not look up at me as i pass, but his sail catches my breeze and inflates mildly. the second is a series of tall windows on the south side of the library, where the sun would stream in if it were summer, but where no sun is streaming. i frown at the windows, because outside, with its face pressed up against the entire length of the thick, insulated glass, is january.

goddamnit!

january.

BEFORE

when i lived in california, the sun was traumatizing. stricken with excess illuminatory stimulation [see note at QUICKEN], i was as lost as a glowbug in a lightbox. i had a hard time remembering who i am.

it went something like this:

i climb up inside the belly of the bus like a pilgrim.

"how much?" i say, "if you don't know where you're going?"

"well," the bus driver says, "where do you want to go?" he looks tired of going places.

"winter." i say.

"okay," he says, "you're on the wrong bus. this bus don't go anywhere near there."

i climb back down, which is like being called in from the yard for permanent supper, like you keep losing the same puzzle, like an old man in a mountain, tumbling off the edge of a precipice in the blast of a last crumble, then doing it again.

i didn’t know how to get from here to there, which means from there to here. and i didn’t know then what i know now, which is that by here, i mean january.

TWO FROSTS

Jack Frost is the personification of frost, ice, snow, sleet, winter, and freezing cold. He is a variant of Old Man Winter who is held responsible for frosty weather, nipping the nose and toes in such weather, coloring the foliage in autumn, and leaving fern-like patterns on cold windows in winter.

FAMOUS AFFILIATIONS:

- Father Frost (fairytale)

- Snow Miser

- General Winter (also known as General Frost)

Robert Frost was an American poet. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in the northeast, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. He maintained that a poem is “never a put-up job… it begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with.” He spent his childhood in San Francisco but most of his adult life in northern New England.

FAMOUS QUOTES:

- A person will sometimes devote all their life to the development of one part of the body— the wishbone.

- The best way out is always through.

- In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

LETTER

yesterday i found a letter in my mailbox.

the letter was a little damp because of weird fog. here, where i live, there is something called the january thaw. i looked it up in the Farmer’s Almanac, which is like the makeshift fifth grade classroom of the weather with grubby boots and mismatched hats and plastic colorful cubbies filled with extra layers and crumpled drawings of flowers, so i could tell you about it in more virtuous terms.

here is what the Farmer’s Almanac said:

FARMER’S ALMANAC | Monday, January 25th | From: Weather Related posts

- Curious marmot portrait

- Poll: Groundhog Day

- Bad Hair Day? Must Be The Weather

What Is A January Thaw?

Don’t be surprised if temperatures rise soon. The days around mid-January have long been associated with the proverbial “January Thaw” when winter briefly loosens its icy grip.

But, what exactly is a January Thaw? Is it real, or just another weather myth?

The January Thaw, like Indian Summer, is more than just another piece of fanciful weather lore. Annual averages really do show a slight temperature increase, and subsequent dip, during the final week of January.

this explains the dampness.

anyway, i reached my mitten into the mailbox, which was like a small, metal cave that might be filled with bats in the back. instead of bats, what came out was one community newspaper with a grainy cover photo of smiling people wearing sweaters, one flyer with four discount pizza coupons, one maple key that had somehow lost its way from october, or maybe had been hiding in the mailbox waiting for april (i unhooked it from the newspaper and threw it back into the mailbox’s creek) and this damp letter.

guess who it was from?

i gazed out across the street toward the mountains in the distance, in their thin snowsuits of lavender and lilac and soft watercolor winter shadow. i wiped my cold nose on my mitten and carefully refolded the letter, tucking it back inside its damp envelope like i was folding an ancient napkin to dab at the woes of the world. my dog looked up at me from the icy mailboxy median with her snow-white eyes, deep brown irises in the middle like fertile flower soil, the alternating bands of gray and white sky reflected there like lace doilies set under warm cups of dandelion tea.

“january,” i said out loud. my dog’s name is olive.

“january,” she agreed, with her dandelion-eyes.

i’d already started preparing my response, where i would shake my mittened fist, demanding to know what, exactly, i was expected to do about all of it—and then, the most miraculous thing happened.

something came unstitched in the cloudhat, and there (right there!) in the part, where the thick silverwhite hair of january flattened away from itself, was the bright blue head of winter.

“it’s still there!” i yelped, finally understanding my job. blue, blue, through. my job is to notice. this is the only way.

THE SOUNDTRACK TO JANUARY

listening for january is like sticking your soft ear in a dried up, sky-bleached conch shell and trying to hear the distant wayward sea inside. there are snow people, of course, who stare into cool space with their pebble eyes and sing branch-and-scarf songs about little sisters and icicles and plastic sleds and buckets with the corners cracked. they wear dingy cherry hats and have vegetable noses that, in the night, the fox admires in the cloud-blocked moonlight under an elaborate suggestion of stars. listening for the fox is like listening to january and its crystal music. everything is stuck awkwardly in the snow. the best music for january is baroque piano. i dance with the dog across the living room with all the lights on in the middle of the day, and we pretend we’re in a royal court to entertain the queen of winter, or we’re just silhouettes on a swell of snowcapped hilltops, every step crunching into the belly of january and leaving little jewels of sapphire ice in our paws and boots and sparkling us further into our cold, clear, wintery song.

ali lanzetta

ali lanzetta is a writer, woolgatherer, creative coach, and bookseller who lives between trees, sleeps under blankets of books, and  is enamored with giraffes, whose hearts are over two feet long. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Verse, Switchback, Eleven Eleven, Flock, Postcard Poems &  Prose, Ghost Proposal, Panapoly, Gertrude, and elsewhere.  ali studied Creative Writing on the enchanted electric hilltops of San Francisco,  but eventually set sail from the city to love, live, and practice the literary arts in a Vermont valley filled with birds. More about ali and her work can be found at alilanzetta.com.