Winter's gift

Every month brings its gifts. February's gift is the light - light returning to remind us that dark is only for a season. I should know better - seasoned (well-seasoned) nature disciple that I am, but it gets me every time. The wonder and awe of the whole thing. 

Discussing scientific / planetary concepts is a daily event in our house. This morning it was explaining to the crafty six and a half year old that morning is morning because Earth spins on its axis as we revolve around the sun. And we call that first light dawn, and dawn turns into morning. All that before coffee. It starts early in the Holly Cottage. 

And so February brings its earth-warming light, but it takes its time. Between January and the last few dwindling days of February's reign, a slumber-full silence has been maintained. Not a silence of the cars that go non-stop, 24/7 on the main road mind. Not a silence of alarm clocks in pitch black mornings. But a silence of the earth - sleepy, dreary, brown-tired - browned off? - restful, turned inward, motioned earth-ward. Seemingly devoid of life. But no - this is dreaming time. Barely a breath or a leaf decomposed. Barely a whisper beneath a foggy shroud. But very much alive. Time to mull and ponder. 

La vie en hiver

In all that silence and respectful pause - nature drawing breath - somehow we see more.

  - The goldcrest that appeared in our garden for the first time ever this winter, flitting from leaf to leaf of sheltering leylandii allowing us occasional glimpses of his beautiful, golden head-dress -

   - And then as if not to be beaten, goldcrest's larger companion - industrious wren - catches the corner of my eye, reminding me she never tires of hunting in littering leaves left where they fell. Wren does wren's bit - helping them return to ravenous earth.

  - And there, peeping up through darkest, rotting leaves - snow-white, snowdrop beauties - heroes of winter's realm and harbingers of spring. Humble warriors that salute us in a sun-hungry world laid bare. Should they be pitied they only experience sun as something rare and hauntingly distant beyond frost beckoning clouds? No - no pity. Only celebration of those that defy the dark. 

And of course there's more - more creatures to be watched - waiting under a leaf, hiding under a rotting branch, burrowing through rich, dark, crumbling earth. Or singing from the top of an ivy clad wall. And we watch what we can, through the barest of days. 

For that is January's gift; beautiful, bittersweet and painfully for some, the longest month of all. As Winter strips everything back to the bone, January honours those bones with time and space, to see and hear more. February carefully, cautiously brings us back, back to the light - back to magnificent glorious, radiant life. 

And then, as if it never was here, Winter is done.