It’s an old man with snow in his beard and an old woman with starlight in her frosted hair.
It’s sleet peppering the roof with buck-shot and rain shedding tears on the windowpanes.
It’s icicles hanging from the eaves like so many crystal daggers.
It’s the brilliance of rime sparkle on the Snowbird Mountains.
It’s a night wind whistling a lonesome tune.
It’s snow drifting in the cove like meringue on a pumpkin pie and sprinkling the oats with coconuts.
It’s Lucy, the Plott bear-hound pup, snapping at falling flakes.
It’s the lake covered with winter glass.
February is the time of the Snow Full Moon.
It’s a deep rutted country road lined with frost.
It’s maintenance crews spreading salt on icy roads.
It’s the sun rising earlier and setting later.
It’s a pale blue light that warms the green of the pines, emphasizes the buds on the poplars and the amber tones of the willows.
It’s sap rising in the maples.
It’s elms standing like plumes against the sky.
It’s tiny, tight catkins hanging from the alders trooping along the edge of the ice-laced stream.
It’s a blue jay strutting like a dandy at a cakewalk.
It’s sparrows sweeping up a hillside and wheeling into the wind against a gray sky.
It’s a hoot owl sounding his mating call.
It’s mother bear giving birth to her cubs in a laurel den.
It’s a deer and a doe at a brook.
It’s a blaze in the fireplace and good hot bowl of soup.
It’s felling trees and cutting fence posts.
It’s the longest and darkest days of the year for the trout fisherman.
It’s leather-britches in a pot and corn pone in the oven.
February is a time for sitting by the fire and reading.
It’s snow chains and four wheel drive.
It’s galax, nature’s own Valentines, making a carpet around the feet of bare trees.
It’s lichens creeping over fence rails and stumps and painting rocks with delicate patterns of red and green in shell like forms.
February is a pair of red mittens and a pair of high-top boots.
It’s a sky with the look of cold skim milk
It’s clouds all ragged and wispy and weird.
It’s a farmhouse alone on a bare mountaintop with wood smoke standing straight up from the chimney.
February in the hills is all this and more….