A short but long month, February. Spring is teasingly close in days — 40 as of this publication. But we who are wise to her flirtations know the countdown to spring’s arrival is meant only to assuage our despair with a flicker of hope, like a squirrel climbing on a birdfeeder and shaking free a few kernels of corn.
Yes, February has found me reaching for the tortured metaphor along with an afternoon hot cup of tea.
I’ve despaired less this winter; remedies of fires, candles and the company of birds and books lightening the heavy blanket of early darkness. The trick will be to keep these habits up even as the skies brighten minute by slow minute past 5 p.m. February and March stretch on before us (no, Ginny, not like an open road, you’re better than that).
New habits may help brighten the gray and reawaken my slumbering creativity. I’ve adopted one that I hope to keep up in every season. My smartphone serves as my alarm, so it’s the first thing I touch when my eyes open. Touch turns to scrolling turns to reading — emails, texts, Facebook posts, Wordle scores, before my brain is fully awake. Why not feed the soft pulsating gray matter which runs this human show more nourishing fare first thing? I’ve stacked a pile of books — poems, a tome on art, a small collection of essays next to my bedside and take a few minutes now to ingest beautiful, rather than prosaic, words upon waking. A small but noticeable shift in my energy the rest of the day may be my imagination, or perhaps I’ve simply stoked creative embers, which brings me to trees.
Bare trees are spectacular in winter. This is a revelation to one who seeks green like it’s a lifesaving medicine as I do. My change of perspective began before Christmas when my sisters and I visited The Breakers, the Vanderbilt’s Newport mansion, to see it festooned with holiday lights. They were lovely, but just as beautiful were the barren trees on the property, up-lit, each branch playing its own role in nature’s architecture. Author Margaret Renkl attributes her encounter with barren trees as one reason she fell in love with winter in her Tennessee backyard, noting, “the peeling bark and bare limbs of the sycamore reveal a ghost tree reaching for the sky.” With her perspective, I now more fully appreciate the ghost birch and maple trees in my own yard. And to see a red cardinal alight on their branches, adding a splash of color to the peeled bark? A true February delight.
Other musings:
— I’ve had trouble finding books that captivate this winter. Enter Marcellus, the soft-hearted, wry octopus in the remarkable book “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt. He is now tied with my favorite character ever in a novel. What do Leo Gursky (“The History of Love”) and a giant Pacific octopus have in common? They were each created by writers who were able to inhabit and bring to life a completely different heart, mind and soul than could possibly be found in their own experiences. Well, that’s the work of a fiction writer, you might say. To me, it’s the work of a magician and I am newly awed at the craft.
— Don’t miss watching “The Holdovers,” streaming on Prime Video, preferably on a snowy night in front of a fire with a glass of brandy. The 1970s-set movie may follow a predictable story arc but nonetheless the disappointment-turned-redemptive narrative fits the dregs of the winter mood in New England perfectly.
— Several Current team members recently spent the day in a glorious glass-walled conference room overlooking the Charles River. Even more glorious — the dozens of news organizations from across Massachusetts and New England gathered by Boston University School of Communications Chair Brian McGrory (formerly Boston Globe editor-in-chief). We shared coffee and best practices and renewed our start-up spirits, inspired by being at the forefront of the transformation of local news. I wore a bracelet gifted by a Current colleague engraved with our tagline — “News for people, not for profit.” The gift and the gathering of creative minds may be enough to get me through to spring, a reminder, as Marcellus might put it, that February, like humans, may be “dull and blundering” but occasionally, also remarkably bright.
President of the Marblehead Current’s board of directors, Virginia Buckingham is the former chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Port Authority, chief of staff to two Massachusetts governors, deputy editorial page editor for the Boston Herald and author of “On My Watch: A Memoir.”
