Surviving February
By Judith Arnold
When I was in college, we used to refer to February as “Lose a Friend a Day Month.” In the hilly little corner of New England where my college was located, the arrival of February meant we’d already endured several long months of winter. The snow blanketing the ground was gray and old. The trees were gray and dead. Our moods were gray and cranky. Look at a classmate or dorm neighbor the wrong way in February, and you risked getting your head bitten off.
I still live in New England, and as far as I’m concerned, February is still “Lose a Friend a Day Month.” By the time February rolls around, the charms of winter have long faded. The whine of auto tires skidding on ice is an obnoxious sound-track to my chilly days. My boots are permanently stained from all the salty slush I’ve trudged through. The heating bills spike my blood pressure.
The only good thing I can say about this wretched month is that it’s short. When our ancestors were designing calendars, someone must have realized that nobody could survive thirty, let alone thirty-one, days of February.
But then…there’s Valentine’s Day. Right in the very middle of the month, a day you’re no doubt losing your fourteenth friend, a miracle occurs. People stop thinking about the dreary weather, the hissing radiators, their winter-chapped skin and the fact that the growl of a snow-blower’s motor has to be one of the most irritating sounds in the universe, and instead they think about…love. They think about the most important people in their lives and they smile. They think about those chalky little candy hearts that have silly phrases like “Luv Ya” and “U R Hot” printed on them and they laugh. They turn the stove off, slam the fridge shut and go out to a restaurant for dinner.
They give each other cards, flowers, chocolate, wine, jewelry—gifts that say, “I love you!” (Or maybe “You are hot!”) When my husband and I were newlyweds, we used to give each other practical items for Valentine’s Day. One year I gave him a cutting board. Another year, he gave me a broom and dust pan. The actual gift didn’t matter. What mattered was the sentiment behind the gifts: I love you! You are hot!
Now that we have been married more than thirty years and are well stocked with cutting boards and dust pans, I usually bake him oatmeal cookies (his favorite) and he gives me chocolate (my favorite.) And the gray, grim February world outside no longer matters. The love we celebrate gives us the strength to endure the final few weeks of winter. No wonder Valentine’s Day falls in the midst of “Lose A Friend a Day Month.” We all need love, but in February, we need it more than ever.
