It’s February now, the shortest and yet endless seeming month that always finds me at my winter worst. There are reasons why I should love it a lot – there are at least a dozen family birthdays in it including my own, there are anniversaries, and a few other celebrations – but sometimes I let my winter weariness overshadow all of that. I try to stay chipper by reminding myself that it is, according to the calendar, the last full month of winter, that the days are noticeably longer, that my seed orders will be arriving this month, and that helps.
My most pressing job in February is pruning the orchard. I need to get it done before the trees start to wake up and I prefer to do it during a thaw. The weather this week looks promising – days in the 40s and even the 50s – a rare thing for February. I hope to get it all done this week. I have over thirty trees to prune, so it will take me several days.
Friday was Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil did not see his shadow. That’s not surprising. Punxsutawney is only about 86 miles south and west of us so our weather isn’t too different from theirs and we hadn’t had any sunny days in a long time. No shadow casting here. And even though the weather this week looks to be mild, I doubt we’ll have an early spring. Sorry Phil. February is too fickle. It’s famous for teasing us with a day or two of springlike warmth and then socking us with a blizzard. That morning as I was leaving for school, music started playing in the house, Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe. It was Hannah’s little reminder that it was Groundhog Day. So that song was stuck in my head all morning, unfortunately. That evening we had our traditional Hannah’s Friday Homemade Pizza and we watched Groundhog Day. If you haven’t ever seen it, this is a summary of it that I wrote several years ago: “Many critics classify Groundhog Day as one of the greatest comedies of all time. To me it’s more than just a comedy, although it certainly is that. It has some deeper meaning too. In the film Phil Connors, a shallow, self-centered TV weather man, gets trapped in a time loop where he spends approximately 12,400 days or nearly 34 years repeating Groundhog Day until he stops using the time loops to indulge his own desires and instead uses them to help others.” (It’s kind of funny to quote myself like that. It makes me feel like I’m putting on airs – Dan Howe, movie pundit.) Anyway, we enjoyed watching it again. And the pizza was excellent.
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| Groundhog Day 2024. |
One of the events that helps to distract us in February is St. Valentine’s Day. It’s one of those holidays that seems to me to have become spoiled by too much commercialism with a lot of hype about buying flowers and cards and candy for your beloved, or as one ad I saw suggests, a new car. When I was a child and the world was simpler and saner, Valentine’s Day was a pretty big deal. I remember in elementary school coming home with a list of my classmates so that everyone was sure to receive a valentine card. We decorated shoe boxes or oatmeal boxes and brought them to school to act as receptacles. Some children brought homemade cards, but most of us brought purchased cards that came in a package with various sentiments. I remember trying to select cards for classmates based on whether they were a friend or someone I didn’t like very much. You had to be careful about what message you sent. I had to find nice cards for Betsey Gallagher and Cathy Derbeck, who were always nice to me, but a more neutral card for Linda Saul, who tended to be rather bossy and kept telling everyone that she was going to marry me. I didn’t want to give her any ideas. And you had to find funny ones with not a hint of mush in them for the boys in the class, the ones with a pun involving a cowboy or an astronaut were best. I remember being offended in the first grade by a card from one of my classmates that had a weeping bunny on it that said, “For crying out loud, be my Valentine.” It was a not so subtle jab because I was famous among my peers for crying almost every day when I was dropped off at kindergarten. They had to bring that up again.
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| Vintage valentines. |
My favorite valentines were from the children who, instead of a card, brought little boxes of conversation hearts for everyone. I still love conversation hearts. And the only kind worth eating, in my opinion, are Necco Sweethearts, not Brachs or SweetTarts. Necco wafers have always been one of my most favorite candies. Necco invented the conversation heart in 1902, and they are still the best. Back in my elementary school days, the messages on the candy hearts were pretty tame – things like Be Mine and Kiss Me, but these days they seem a bit bolder, you can even find mean and obscene ones.
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| Necco Sweethearts, the best. |
Early in our married years, around 1987, my wife made a valentine box and every year she would make a card and fill the box with candy or cookies and put it somewhere where I would find it. One year, when I was in college, she showed up with the box and with our two children at the time, Geoffrey and Rachel, in tow, to one of my classes – it was a constitutional history class taught by a rather severe bachelor professor – and interrupted the class to present it to me. I was a bit mortified, but the class, and even my professor, were amused. She still has that box, almost forty years later. It’s a little worse for the wear. She uses it to store the valentines she receives now.
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| The old valentine box. |
My Aunts Esther and Eleanor loved Valentine’s Day. It was their father’s birthday (my great grandfather Theodorus Howe, 1856-1923). They always sent out homemade valentines cards. I received one every year, and later my children did too. When we moved here, we decided to carry on their tradition. Beginning in the first days of February, the supplies come out – paper, colored pens and pencils, doilies, and stickers – and we make valentines. We have a list of family and friends to send them to. We sit and watch romantic movies while we work. It’s a fun tradition and it is already well underway right now.
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| Making valentines. |
The movies we watch while making valentines range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Miriam and Hannah have quite an extensive list – over forty titles. We don’t watch all of them every year. There are the Jane Austens – Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, etc. I enjoy watching those. I love the older romantic comedies. We’ve already watched some of my favorites – Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story (Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, a great combination), and How to Marry a Millionaire, Gentleman Prefer Blondes, and Some Like it Hot (Marilyn Monroe in her best roles as Pola Debevoise, Lorelei Lee, and Sugar Cane). There are the silly Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies, Pillow Talk , Lover Come Back , and Send Me No Flowers. Then there are the Shakespeare romances that I love like Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Love’s Labor Lost – I also love Romeo and Juliet, but it doesn’t have a happy ending so we don’t watch it for Valentine’s Day. I like some of the newer romances like Sleepless in Seattle, Return to Me, and Miriam and Hannah’s favorite, Wild Mountain Thyme. Then there are the movies they sometimes watch that aren’t on the official list, but somehow creep in – the endless stream of Hallmark movies with their identical plots and sappy acting. That’s where I draw the line. I don’t watch those.
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| Valentines movies. |
Saint Valentine is the patron saint of lovers, epileptics, and beekeepers, an odd combination. He was a Roman priest, or some legends say he was the Bishop of Terni, who suffered martyrdom during the persecution of Christians by the emperor Claudius II Gothicus in AD 269. According to legend, St. Valentine, while in prison, signed a letter “from your Valentine” to his jailer’s daughter, whom he had befriended and miraculously healed from blindness. Another legend says that he defied the emperor’s orders and secretly married couples to spare the husbands from being sent to war. He was martyred and his body was buried on the Via Flaminia on February 14, and that date was established by Pope Gelasius I in AD 496 as the Feast of Saint Valentine. Some historians believe the Saint’s day was established to replace the pagan Roman celebration of the Lupercalia, which involved sacrificing goats and dogs and people running naked through the streets of Rome flogging each other with leather straps. Oh those pagans!
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| St. Valentine. |
During the Middle Ages, they believed that birds chose their mates on St. Valentine’s Day, hence Chaucer’s poem The Parlement of Foules.
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make, When every fowl comes there choose his make,
Of every kinde, that men thynke may; Of every kind, that men may think,
And that so huge a noyse gan they make, And that so huge a noise did they make,
That erthe and see, and tree, and every lake That earth and sea, and tree, and every lake
So ful was, that unnethe was ther space Was so full, that hardly was there space
For me to stonde, so ful was al the place. For me to stand, so full was all the place.
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| A Medieval parliament of fowles. |
The birds so far in February, at least the ones I see, don’t seem at all interested in pairing up. From the activity at my bird feeders, it seems they are only interested in eating. Maybe they are waiting until the 14th to begin. I have the usual crowd of finches, sparrows, nuthatches, chickadees, jays, juncos, titmice, and woodpeckers. We’ve had a little brown creeper (Certhia americana) visiting us regularly and we don’t see them very often. There have been reports of robins and bluebirds away to the south of us. They need to stay south for a few more weeks. I always feel sorry for them when they come north too soon.
Finally, yesterday, we had a sunny day. It was a day too late for shadow making, which is a good thing if there is any credence to the groundhog lore. It was cold, but it was sunny, and that was nice. The present state of the snow is spotty. It makes the earth look like it has a bad skin disease. I like the snow to be either pretty or gone, nothing in between.
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| Sunshine at last. |
This weekend was our Stake Conference. They wanted us to attend in person and that meant two trips to Jamestown and back, one yesterday and another today. That’s a lot of time spent in the car – a total of about eight hours. The meetings were very good, but the long drive time detracted somewhat from my enjoyment of them. Stacey spoke in the afternoon meeting yesterday and Julie spoke in the evening session. They both gave great talks. Our meeting today was excellent and the congregational singing was very impressive. I love to hear so many voices singing hymns. So we are back now. I’m tired and sore from sitting in meetings and in the car for so long. It’s nice outside – sunny and 45°. I’ve finished the chores already. I think I’ll take a walk around the yard. Miriam is out already and has reported seeing the first of the snowdrops. It’s early for us. Maybe Phil is right. I hope he’s right, but I never trust February.
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| Snowdrops! |
